


The Raven

by Narsil



Series: The Raven [1]
Category: Ah! Megami-sama! | Oh My Goddess!, Ranma 1/2, Teen Titans (Animated Series)
Genre: Gen, Prequel, Ranma-chan, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 15:59:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Narsil/pseuds/Narsil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The inevitable finally happens, and Ranma is killed during one of the fights - and thanks to Genma, things get even worse. Then SHE is given the opportunity to return the pain on those responsible...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The End?

**Author's Note:**

> This first chapter is inspired by the opening of Tuisto's "Daimakaicho Ranma" (an unfinished and apparently dead story available on fanfiction.net) and much of the middle of the story by J. O. Barr's "The Crow" (simultaneously one of the most powerful, most painful, and most violently brutal graphic novels I've ever read). So if you enjoy good eventually triumphing but paying a very high price for that victory, enjoy. If not, you might want to give this story a pass.

“Bakah!”

A dark-haired, pigtailed boy sighed as he sailed out of the house and splashed down into the koi pond, instantly losing several inches and a number of pounds. _Well, at least her aim has gotten pretty good even if her temper hasn’t,_ the now redheaded girl thought to herself as she pulled herself up onto the rocks around the pond. Pulling off her shirt Ranma wrung it out as her dark-haired fiancée stormed out of the house behind her.

“And when are you going to learn some feminine modesty?” Akane shouted, and Ranma shrugged as she pulled her still-damp shirt back on over her generous chest.

From the doorway, brown-haired Nabiki chuckled. “About the time she starts wearing bras,” she jibed, and Ranma scowled.

“Yeah, right, like _that’s_ ever going to happen,” she retorted, and the middle Tendo nodded.

“Exactly,” she said, stepping out of the doorway so that Ranma’s parents could join them in the yard.

“Boy, apologize to your fiancée immediately,” Genma stated firmly.

“For what, not letting her poison me this time?” Ranma shouted. “If you think her cooking’s so good, _you_ eat it!”

“Son, it is not seemly for a man to show such disrespect for his fiancée,” Nodoka said with a frown, and Ranma rolled her eyes.

“Mom, _cockroaches_ can’t stomach Akane’s cooking, what make ya think _I_ can?” she asked rhetorically, and Akane seemed to glow red as her hammer rematerialized in her hand and she started toward her fiancé.

Ranma sighed and braced herself, ready for another trip on Air Akane, when suddenly a purple-haired, voluptuous figure appeared on the dojo compound wall, dropped inside, and without a word charged straight for the hammer-wielding girl. A chúi whirled unerringly toward the side of Akane’s head, but Ranma got there first, diving into her fiancée and the two falling and rolling to the side as she kicked out and knocked the chúi to the side.

“Shampoo, what the hell are ya playin’ at?” Ranma shouted. “That would a’ killed her!”

“That point,” Shampoo growled, circling around as Ranma bounced to her feet. “Shampoo through playing games.”

Ranma paled. _She’s dead serious,_ she thought, then winced slightly at her choice of words. “Akane,” she hissed as the dark-haired girl rose to her feet, “get over by my pop, _now_!”

Akane glared at the smaller redhead. “Ranma, how many times have I told you, stay out of my fights! I can take care of myself.”

“Yeah, right!” Ranma retorted. “Listen, Akane. she’s serious this time, get over there, pop will protect you if ...”

“Ranma, you destroyer of women!” came a shout from another wall of the compound as a long-haired Chinese boy wearing coke-bottle glasses dropped down inside the compound, a sword in each hand. “Today you die!”

_Oh, great,_ Ranma complained to herself. _The only thing needed to make this the perfect day is ..._ A section of yet another compound wall exploded, revealing a large muscular boy dressed in disheveled, travel-stained clothing and wearing a yellow and black bandanna. _I just_ had _to push my luck,_ Ranma grumbled to herself as Ryoga stalked into the compound.

“Ranma, because of you I’ve seen hell. Prepare to die!” Ryoga sneered, snatching off a bandanna and shaking it out straight as Mousse moved to the side and one of his swords disappeared.

“Yeah, I’ve heard it all be — whoops!” Ranma started, then grabbed Akane again and rolled the two of them out of the way as both of Shampoo’s chúi smashed down where her fiancée had been, kicking Shampoo’s legs out from underneath her in the process. Ranma bounced up to a crouch, glancing back and forth between Ryoga and Mousse, then leaned back as a chúi flashed across in front of her.

Behind Ranma, Akane rose to her knees, her anger tunneling her vision to to the red pigtail a few feet away. “Ranma,” she screamed, “I told you to stay out of my FIGHTS!” And her hammer swung up toward her fiancé’s back.

Ranma heard the shout behind her, sensed the swing, and rose to avoid it as she watched Shampoo angle to the side for another shot at Akane, then all her air gushed out of her lungs as two hammerblows to her breasts knocked her back a step. Looking down, she saw a pair of Mousse’s largest throwing knives buried to the hilt in her chest. _Where’s the pain?_ she thought as she turned slightly to look into the rage-filled eyes of her fiancée — and a bandanna whirled across her throat and washed the vision away in a spray of red and Mousse was there swords flashing and the ground was rising up toward her face....

/\

Akane wiped at her eyes furiously. What ... what _was_ this ... what was _happening_? Her eyes finally clear she looked around at everyone on all sides, frozen as stiff as so many statues. Then, seeing the direction of their gaze, looked down at the ground in front of her. Was that _Ranma_ lying face down in front of her? But ... but there was so much red ... the same red, she realized, that literally soaked her front.

Jerkily, Genma moved away from the door to the house toward his child. “Ranma, stop playing around!” he shouted. “This is no way to act in a serious fight!” He reached down and grasped Ranma’s shoulder and flipped her over, then fell back as the last strands of flesh holding her head to her body tore and it rolled away to Akane’s feet, while her intestines gushed out of the massive slit across her stomach.

Akane dropped to her knees and grabbed the head as she heard Nabiki emptying her stomach of its contents behind her, then looked up as an apparition faded into sight in front of her. He was an obese humanoid figure, slightly taller than she was, with reddened, diseased looking skin and a huge, engorged phallus. Looking at her, he smiled, showing jagged teeth as a long tongue snaked out and she jerked back to avoid its touch, then gasped as she realized that bound up in one of the two bunches of long tentacles that he had instead of arms was Ranma! Girl-Ranma, naked, and oddly see-through, but definitely Ranma, staring at her as she struggle uselessly to break free, one tentacle across her mouth, eyes begging for help.

The demonic visitor turned his gaze from her toward a white-faced, shaking Genma. “Really, Genma, I was beginning to think you’d actually won our little contest! It didn’t seem like anything could kill Ranma, and the way that he did all the fighting he could in his male form, I was afraid if he _was_ killed I’d get a male soul I’d have to trade away. But it all worked out in the end, and my little friend” — with a nod to his groin — “gets a new playmate after all.” With a malicious smile, he added, “I hope the yamasenken worked out as well for you as your first-born child’s soul will for me.”

Then, the fat demon faded out of sight with his prize even as Akane shot to her feet and charged forward, swinging uselessly at empty air. She whirled around swinging aimlessly, shouting for the demon to show himself, then finally stopped, panting. Looking around she found herself almost alone in the yard, Ryoga just vanishing through another fresh hole in the wall and Genma standing over his child’s corpse cursing Ranma for a weakling and a failure, and from the doorway to the house she could hear Nodoka’s shaky voice: “Hello, police? I need ... I need to report a training accident.”

Akane’s scream of agony stripped her throat raw.


	2. The Daimakaicho

Hild smiled to herself as she stalked through Niflheim’s central office complex with two burly black-skinned subordinates at her heels, one carrying a massive sword strapped across his back and the other carrying a large canister, as office workers blanched at the lack of expression on her face and busied themselves at their desks, attention fixed on their work. A smiling Hild was scary, a scowling Hild was worse, but an expressionless Hild was a nightmare beyond belief, and _someone_ was in for a great deal of pain.

After several minutes terrorizing the workforce by meandering through the complex, she turned toward the office of a mid-level manager and strode through without breaking her stride as one of the two demons accompanying her stepped ahead to open the door. Inside, a small, pale-skinned, bat-winged, hairless male looked up from his computer terminal and Hild was impressed as his only reaction as he rose to his feet was a slight flinch.

“Mistress Hild, this is a surprise! What can I do for you?” he asked, then doubled over with a scream as Hild stepped up and planted a fist deep in his groin. She reached down and picked up the writhing demon by his throat and casually held him at arm’s length as she turned to look at her companion with the sword. “Trethgar, this will be your office until you get this mess is cleaned up. The usual rules for guilt and innocence apply, but be ... creative ... when it comes to the guilty. _Enjoy_ yourself.”

Trethgar smiled broadly. “But of course, Mistress,” he replied, only to shrink when she frowned.

“Just don’t let your enthusiasm for your work lead you to draw it out, there will be other assignments waiting for you when this one is finished,” Hild warned, and he nodded hastily.

“Of course, Mistress!” he agreed, and Hild turned her attention back to demon now struggling in her grip and pounding ineffectually on her arm.

“As for you, Histval, did you really think your diversion of souls from their assigned destinations for your little group’s personal amusements wouldn’t be noticed? So, what will I do with you?” She stared into Histval’s eyes for several long minutes as he continued to struggle, then tightened her grip and _twisted_ , and with a wet crack Histval’s neck snapped like a twig. Tossing the twitching body against a wall, Hild stepped back and crossed her arms across her chest and waited.

For several minutes nothing happened, then the translucent form of Histval’s soul slowly rose from his corpse, and the demon with the canister stepped forward, twisted open the top and pointed it at the figure. Histval’s form wavered like mist caught in a breeze and drifted toward the open canister, and he desperately tried to grab at the wall, the desk, the edge of the canister, but his hands simply passed through every surface and he was quickly sucked into the canister and out of sight. The demon holding the canister replaced the top and looked expectantly at his Mistress.

Hild stared thoughtfully into space for a long moment. “I think … we’ll start with some sensory deprivation, call it three months. Then … you’ve seen the report of what Histval’s little group did with their diverted souls?” The demon nodded, and Hild smiled. “Why don’t you get some friends together and show Histval what it’s like on the receiving end? Say, the same amount of time his victims suffered — consecutively.”

Now the demon’s nod turned eager. “Certainly, thank you, Mistress!” he gushed, and her smile turned into a laugh.

“Don’t thank me, you’ve earned it,” she said. “Now, back to headquarters.”

/oOo\

Hild’s secretary looked up with a smile as Hild strode into her office anteroom. “Welcome back, Mistress,” she said. “Did you enjoy your little excursion?”

“Of course, Angie,” Hild replied airily, smiling fondly as she walked toward the door to her inner sanctum, “no better way to end the day than seeing to it that someone gets what he so richly deserves. Anything come up while I was having my fun?”

“Actually, yes, one of the green-flagged files sent an alert.”

Hild’s fond smile vanished as her gaze snapped back to Angie. “Which file?” she asked.

“Ranma Saotome’s,” Angie replied, watching her mistress intently, and Hild carefully refused to flinch.

“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “So what happened to set off the flag?”

“He, or rather she, is dead — killed by two of her rivals. Rothgan’s already claimed her,” Angie informed her, and Hild nodded even as an _Oh, shit!_ reverberated through the back of her mind.

“You’ve forwarded the updated file to my inbox?” At Angie’s nod Hild resumed striding toward her office. “Very well, I am not to be disturbed until further notice.”

/\

Hild finished reading the updates to the file of one Xian Pu of the Joketsuzoku, keyed it for red-flagged status, then leaned back and for long minutes stared unseeing at the one-way window that looked out over her jagged and fiery domain. Finally, she rose to her feet and walked to the wall to the left of the window between two bookcases, traced a large oval with a fingernail, then stepped back and incanted lengthily in a language dead since before the world’s creation. For a long moment the air in her sanctum seemed to freeze, then the traced oval went midnight black and Hild stepped through it and vanished.

/oOo\

Kami-sama glanced up in mid-sentence as an alarm only he could notice sounded, then stood. Instantly the Valkyries nervously sitting beside him leaped to their feet, but he simply smiled beneficently and waved them toward the door that had appeared a few feet away, hanging in empty air. “I am afraid that something has come up,” he said. “Begin your assignments as discussed, and return tomorrow at this time.” The two nodded and knelt, then hurried to the door and were gone, the door soundlessly vanishing with them.

With their disappearance, the magnificent villa in whose courtyard they been sitting wavered and shrank to a simple cottage. Kami-sama shook his head ruefully, opened the front door, and stepped inside and walked to the drawing room to welcome his guest.

Hild looked up from filling a large tumbler from a bottle she’d just taken from the liquor cabinet, and Kami-sama gently shook his head as he walked over to her and took the bottle from her slightly shaking hand and finished pouring before filling a small glass for himself and returning the bottle to the cabinet. Turning to find Hild sitting on the couch and gulping her drink, he sighed and sat down next to her with an arm across her shoulders. “That bad?” he asked gently, and Hild shuddered.

“Ranma’s dead, and female,” she said curtly. “Xian Pu and Mu Tse got tired of waiting and decided to take matters into their own hands, and Ku Lon will undoubtedly ignore the implications in order to protect her heir. Rothgan will be enjoying his new prize right now, before hanging her up on his wall with the rest until the next time he gets the urge — which, knowing him, will be in a few hours.” Kami-sama winced and tightened his hug. “You hadn’t heard?” Hild asked, and he shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I’ve been discussing some Valkyrie observations of some outlying Islamist enclaves.  I believe they have outlived their usefulness, and will make fine targets for your Furies.”

Hild nodded. “Good, more grist for my mill. I’ll _enjoy_ seeing them show up, unlike —” She choked up, and Kami-sama took the mostly empty tumbler from her hand and set it on a side table, then pulled her onto his lap and into a close embrace as she broke down.

“I know,” he murmured. “But at least most of those that show up in your realm because of their parents’ bargains quickly figure out they really shouldn’t be there and move on.”

“But why do some of them have to be so _stubborn_ about it?” she almost wailed, and he just shook his head.

“It’s that core of stubbornness that helps make them what they are,” he said, and Hild nodded jerkily against his shoulder.

“I know, and I suspect I’ll be getting a Fury out of it, once Ranma’s had some time to build up her hatred, but still …”

For a time they just sat, then finally Hild sat up with a sigh and got up from Kami-sama’s lap. “I’d better be getting back,” she said. “I’m supposed to be in my inner sanctum, and my secretary is getting suspicious — I’m going to have to put her back out in the field and get a new one fairly soon. But, can I come back tonight? Not for sex, not while Ranma’s … I’d just like to spend the night being held.”

“Of course, I shouldn’t have anything coming up that would interrupt us. And it will be good to have you back for a night, whatever the circumstances. I miss you, Frigg,” Kami-sama said with a gentle smile.

Hild smiled back at her husband. “And I you, Odin.” Then, her face losing all expression, she walked over to the nearest wall, called up the transportation circle, and was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While I normally don't give away spoilers, I thought I'd give everyone a heads up that THERE WILL BE NO RAPE SCENES FOR RANMA. The after effects, certainly, but the actual rapes will be off stage.
> 
> Yes, this one is going to be seriously Alternate Universe so far as Oh, My Goddess!is concerned, or possibly Secret History, with Kami-sama and Hild working together behind the scenes. And yes, there's a reason for that beyond just thinking it would be a cool idea. One thing I've noticed is especially common in fantasy and comic book universes is that their metaphysics is based on the Manichean heresy: that Light and Dark are at war with each other, with the outcome in doubt. Understandable, of course, it certainly ramps up the dramatic tension when the stakes are that high: I remember one scene in The Fionavar Tapestry, when King Arthur (yes, the King Arthur) asks if this is the last war, and the answer is, "It is if we lose." I'm sure any reader can name a handful of series with the same basis. But while I enjoy those stories, I find I don't care much for the underlying metaphysics. I much prefer one where the ultimate power is Good, and Evil is either an illusion or destined to fail — the dramatic tension doesn't come from the ultimate fate of the world, but rather the fate of the world here-and-now and of those individuals caught up in the struggle. So for this story, OMG! added to the mix but Hild and Kami-sama working in tandem behind the scenes, not even their closest subordinates being let in on the secret.


	3. Job Offer

The Daimakaicho of Niflheim sat at her desk and stared at the information on her monitor screen, as she engaged in an activity that none of her subordinates would have believed possible — dithering. Finally, she rose from her desk and strode to the large window and leaned her forehead against the one-way glass, staring unseeing out across the rugged, stony plain and river of lava flowing from the jagged mountains in the distance.

_It’s been a year since Ranma arrived,_ she thought. _A whole_ year _! I’ve known some stubborn people before, but she ... ! And Rothgan’s getting worried. No, it’s beyond worry, he’s beginning to panic — he revels in hate and anger in his new acquisitions, enjoys breaking his “toys” to his use, turning it into fear and submission, but it just isn’t happening this time and if I don’t move soon Rothgan is going to do something stupid — he’s already increasing how often he’s ... using ... her again, apparently working on the theory that if your plan isn’t working, try more of the same. Stomping on him after he crosses the line would be a pleasure, but it wouldn’t do_ Ranma _much good. But if I move too soon and Ranma’s newfound hate isn’t strong enough or she casts too wide a net ..._

For long minutes Hild remained at the window, before finally pushing away and turning back toward to her desk. Striding back to her seat, she sat and hit the intercom button for her secretary. “Victoria, summon Trethgar, Arlonath, a couple of lackeys … and Angie, your predecessor, as soon as they can get here. We’re going to be making a surprise visit.”

“At once, Daimakaicho!” her secretary’s tense voice came back, and Hild sighed slightly as she released the intercom button. _It’ll be nice once she gets past the “incomprehensible evil” stage of being afraid of me, so she can relax a little._

/\

Followed by her five-member entourage, Hild shook her head as she strode past the cringing doorkeeper chained to her seat — the naked dark-haired, dusky-skinned woman would have been beautiful if she was cleaned of the dried, caked-on scum and washed up a bit, Rothgan must drop by occasionally.

As they strode down the hallway, the doors at the end opened and the obese Rothgan hurried through and bowed to his ultimate superior, his tentacle-arms waving nervously. “Mistress, it is a pleasure to see you!” he quavered, and Hild smiled sardonically.

“Of course it is,” she replied as she walked past him and waved for him to follow. “Don’t worry, I won’t be here long, I’m just here to pick up the new fury you’ve been incubating for me.”

“New fury?” Rothgan asked worriedly, and Hild’s smile turned vicious.

“Of course, Ranma,” she replied in apparent surprise. “You mean you _weren’t_ trying to ramp her anger and hate up to Fury levels? Oh, well, I’m sure once she’s adjusted to her new position she’ll remember you kindly, even so.” Rothgan’s crimson skin faded to pink and he wavered on his feet, before pulling himself together and rushing to catch up with his visitors as they strode into what he fondly called his viewing hall.

Hild kept her expression carefully neutral as she strode along the hall, passing naked, mucked-encrusted woman after naked, muck-encrusted woman, unmoving in their niches except for their wounded, terrified eyes that followed the group as best they could. Given, most of them were there because they’d used sex as a tool in power games, or because they’d sold their souls to Rothgan for power while alive. Given, most of them didn’t stay all _that_ long before getting the point and moving on. Still ...

Then a niche came into view displaying a petite redhead that was different from the rest. The nakedness was the same, as was the caked-on scum (some still drying), but there was nothing beaten about the eyes — _hers_ blazed with anger and hatred, and Hild nodded in satisfaction. “Yes, she’ll do nicely,” she mused, then nodded to the two lackeys that had accompanied her. “Take her down, get her cleaned up, then bring her to my sanctum.” Looking up at the burly black-skinned demon to her left, she added, “Rethgar, accompany them — protect everyone from each other.”

Rethgar gazed thoughtfully at the tiny human soul being removed from her niche, reached up to the sword strapped to his back and loosened it in its scabbard, and nodded. “Of course, Mistress,” he rumbled, and Hild turned to her “host.”

“Rothgan, thank you for your help, even if it was unintentional,” she said sweetly, and the pink demon started to shake. “Now, I’m afraid there is one piece of bad news. I noticed that it’s been awhile since your last audit, so Angie here” — nodding to her pale former secretary standing beside her, staring wide-eyed at the women on display — “will be correcting that oversight. I’m sure you will see that she receives full cooperation.”

As Rothgan stammered out his assurances that he would do all he could, Hild turned to the second black-skinned demon that had accompanied her. “Arlonath, you are to see to it that Angie is not disturbed or hindered during her investigation, and escort her back to headquarters when she is ready to report,” she said firmly, and Arlonath nodded, contemptuously looking over Rothgan, then tapped Angie on the shoulder, making her leap to the side with a shriek.

“Come, girl, let’s get started,” he rumbled, with a nod to Hild, and Angie jerkily imitated him.

“Of course, with your permission, Mistress,” Angie said, and Hild waved her off airily, smiling inwardly at the vicious snarl that crossed Angie’s face as she turned away.

/\

Hild sighed in relief when the intercom chirped its signal of her secretary’s request for attention. _Wouldn’t it be nice if I could simply sit the occasional rebel leader down and have them handle my paperwork for a few days?_ she thought whimsically as she reached for the acceptance button. “Yes, Victoria?” she asked with a smile as the lovely blonde woman’s face appeared.

“Ranma and her escort are here, Mistress,” Victoria replied nervously, and Hild nodded.

“Excellent, send them in,” she ordered, and looked toward the door. A few seconds later it opened, and Rethgar and Ranma stepped through.

Hild ignored Rethgar for a moment to look over his charge. Ranma was cleaned up nicely, now-shiny red hair tied back in a pigtail, dressed in the black and red clothing she’d favored in life — and eyes burning and darting in all directions, looking for any chance to strike. Nodding her approval, she looked up at Rethgar. So, any problems?” she asked, and the demon shrugged.

“Nothing major,” he said as he clapped a hand on Ranma’s shoulder to abort her lunge across the desk for Hild. “Once Ranma realized the lackeys were cleaning her up and not assaulting her, everything went fine.”

Hild smiled cheerily. “I’m _so_ pleased,” she said happily, then nodded to the redhead. “Ranma, have a seat. I have an offer for you.”

Ranma warily sat on the edge of her seat, and Hild leaned back and gazed thoughtfully at her for a long moment. “So, let’s start at the beginning. The purpose of Niflheim, what you’ve probably heard referred to as Hell, is to test mortals while alive and punish and instruct them in their failures after they die. However, sometimes mortals fail so spectacularly that we … hurry up the process a bit, don’t wait for their deaths. To that end, I have an elite band of warriors called the Furies, and I’d like you to join it.”

Ranma stared at the beautiful blond woman across the desk in shock for a long moment, then settled back in her chair. “Why me?” she asked, and Hild shrugged.

“Why not you?” she said. “You are a trained warrior proven in battle, you understand honor,” — _well enough_ — “and you’ve certainly learned how to hate abusers in the past year, you’re perfect. However, if you don’t wish to accept the offer I can hardly force you to take it — you’ll just be handed back to Rothgan to hang up on his wall again, I’m sure he’d be delighted to have you back.”

Ranma snorted. “Yeah, like hell ya can’t force me ta take the position. A’ course I’ll take it! What do I gotta do?”

“Good!” Hild enthused, sitting up straight. “Now, there is _one_ last test to make sure you qualify, but you shouldn’t mind it — name the mortals you most want to take revenge upon, and we’ll send you back to Midgard — Earth — to deal with them personally.”

Ranma stiffened in shock. “That’s it — the entire test?” she asked incredulously, and at Hild’s nod a viciously hungry look crossed the busty redhead’s face. “Well, in that case let’s go for Pop, Ryoga, Shampoo, Mousse, and Akane,” she snarled.

_Oh, shit! I was afraid of that._ “Good,” Hild repeated, and pushed a button to the side of her desk. In the ceiling above her head, a portal opened up and after a few minutes a large black raven flew through and landed on the desk in front of her, looking around the room and then focusing on Ranma with eyes flickering with intelligence. Reaching out to pet the raven, Hild said, “You will be given whatever tools or weapons you ask for, transported to the location of each of your targets, and returned when you are done. You will be no stronger or faster than you were while alive, but you may find that you are unkillable and heal rapidly. This raven” — nodding to the bird on her desk — “is Thought. He will accompany you to observe all that happens.”

Ranma looked thoughtfully at the bird, then nodded. “Alright, when do I start?” she asked.

“When would you like to start?”

“Not right away, I’m a little out of practice. Ya got anywhere I can do katas, anyone I can spar with?” Ranma asked, and Hild nodded, then looked over at Rethgar.

“See to it,” she ordered, and the demon nodded.

“Of course, Mistress. Come on, Ranma, let’s get started. I’m curious to see what you are capable of.”

Ranma grinned as she hopped out of her chair. “You betcha! It’ll feel good to finally cut loose.” She started for the door, then stopped and turned back to Hild. “Uh, thanks fer the opportunity, I owe ya big,” she said, scratching the back of her neck and looking at the floor.

“No need to thank me, Ranma, I’m sure you will more than repay me. _Everyone_ repays me eventually,” Hild said brightly, and the spirit and demon quickly left, Thought flying after them.

As soon as the door closed, the smile slid from Hild’s face and she simply stared into space for long minutes before shaking her head. _Well, maybe this will still work out,_ she thought bleakly, ignoring the sinking feeling in her gut, and returned to the paperwork Ranma’s visit had interrupted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One little idea I'm taking from the Hell anthologies back when the shared universe fad was big (C.J. Cherryh's "Legions of Hell" was my favorite) is where Nifleim's bureaucracy comes from. In that series, all the players had sycophants, greenish translucent blobby ghosts that spied and ran errands for the people that mattered — if I remember correctly, they were bootlickers in life that got to carry on in death. As you might imagine, there are a lot of them. Hild's bureaucrats aren't green blobby ghosts, but they *are* the spirits of mortals that were the brownnosers in life that didn't care what the job was so long as it got done and they got the credit (or at least avoided the blame if things didn't work out). Now, in death they get to reprise their roles until they figure out that jobs have purposes, those purposes have moral value, and that that moral value matters to them.
> 
> And of course, the Furies are my own creation, just a thought that if Asgard has the Valkyries, then Niflheim should have a corresponding elite force.


	4. Family Reunion

Genma slowly came awake next to his wife in the bed they shared in the rebuilt Saotome home, with the vague feeling that something was wrong. He lay there in the dark, eyes closed, reaching out to sense the ki around him, and found all well — the only real sources other than a few insect sparks were Nodoka beside him and their unborn child growing in her womb. In the freedom of the darkness, he gently smiled to himself at the slight touch. Nodoka had refused to make plans to get an ultrasound, insisting that it wasn’t “traditional” to learn of the baby’s sex before birth, but he thought she simply didn’t want to spoil the surprise, which was why he hadn’t told her he could tell their child’s sex from the feel of the ki. Carefully, to avoid waking Nodoka, he reached out and placed his hand on her stomach.

“Hiya, Panda.”

The voice came like a splash of cold water, and Genma shot upright, looking around wildly, eyes widening at the sight of a familiar petite busty redhead leaning against the bedroom wall, the Satome honor blade held in her crossed arms and a large raven sitting on her shoulder. It wasn’t possible, there was no ki signature at all, there was nothing there! “R-R-Ranma?” Genma stuttered as Nodoka stirred beside him, opening bleary eyes.

“Yup,” the impossible apparition said, pushing upright.

“But you’re dead! We buried you!” Genma said in a choked voice, and Ranma chuckled.

“Right again, dead and damned, thanks ta you. But even in hell ya sometimes get a second chance.”

Ranma’s voice finally sank into Nodoka’s sleep-fogged mind, and she bolted upright next to her husband and stared at her child, stunned speechless. Ranma glanced at her coldly, then refocused her attention on Genma.

“Wonderful!” Genma enthused. “You escaped! I knew you would, not even Hell can hold a true martial artist. Now that you’re back, we can hold the wedding and then ...”

“One problem, Panda, I didn’t escape,” Ranma said, her voice arctic cold in a way her parents had never heard before, and Genma felt a shiver of uncertainty travel up his spine.

“ ‘Didn’t escape’?” he repeated.

“Yup, I was taken away from the demon ya sold me to by the Daimakaicho and given an offer I couldn’t refuse, ta join Hell’s elite. Funny how the test ta get in is what I wanted ta do, anyway — kill the people that sent me ta Hell in the first place and see if they enjoy it as much as I did.”

“K-k-kill ...”

“Yeah, kill,” Ranma repeated, “an’ you’re first.” Ranma’s eyes flickered to Nodoka again and back to Genma. “Why don’t we take this out back? No point in getting’ yer blood all over Mom.” Then, when Genma simply sat, too stunned to move, his daughter added, “though here’s good fer me, too, I don’t really care that much.”

Also glancing at his wife and nodding jerkily, Genma got out of bed and pulled on his gi, then stumbled past Ranma towards the door to the back yard with the raven flying ahead of him, seeing Ranma walking soundlessly behind him out of the corner of his eye. This _was_ Ranma, but a Ranma with all the gentleness and mercy he’d mocked and insulted her for burned out — she really meant to kill him, and Genma had no idea what she was capable of now. “What about your mother? Do you intend to kill her, too?” he asked as the pair walked out into the cool night air.

“Nah,” Ranma replied. “She helped make my life hell, but nothin’ she did sent me ta the real thing — that was you. Now, let’s do this.”

Genma nodded, turning to face Ranma as the redhead unsheathed the Saotome blade and gently leaned the scabbard by the door, his mind racing. _Good,_ he thought, _that means I only have to worry about me, and not all three of us. That simplifies things enormously._

For a time, the two simply stood staring at each other. Finally, Ranma said, “Ya aren’t going ta be able ta outwait me, Panda. After waitin’ a year while gettin’ raped on a regular basis, I’m in no hurry. As far as I’m concerned, we can stand here all night, and the next night, however many it takes.”

Genma nodded, tensed as if to charge, and suddenly Ranma was down and rolling to the side as two vacuum blades slashed through the space her midsection had been a split-second earlier. Even as Ranma rolled to her feet Genma turned to flee, wrapping the obscuring blanket of the Silent Thief over himself and immediately changing direction at a right angle of his first dash as he employed the Saotome Final Technique. If he could just make it away and into hiding, buy time to search for a way to banish his son back the hell he’d come out of ...

Then he felt intense slashing pain across the backs of his ankles and collapsed, his out of control momentum smashing him through the fence and into the neighbor’s yard. As lights went on in the neighbor’s house, Ranma stepped around to where Genma could see her plainly, casually holding her sword, blood running along its edge.

“Gee, Panda, you’ve gotten predicable in yer old age,” Ranma said almost lightly, then raised her sword in a two-handed grip. Desperately, Genma attempted a leg sweep, only to have Ranma leap over the kick, somehow slip _between_ two more vacuum blades, the light in the neighbor’s house going out as the blades continued on and one chopped through the nearest pole and powerlines broke and sparked as the top thundered to the street. Genma desperately raised his arms and poured ki into them until they seemed to glow. He should be able to strengthen them enough to stop a blade. It would hurt, but he’d still be alive. He determinedly ignored his own cynical voice asking, _And then what?_

Ranma saw the uplifted arms beginning to glow. _Oh, no you don’t!_ she thought hungrily, and _something_ seemed to flow out of her, suffusing the sword, turning it pitch black, and then the blade sheared through both forearms and even as her father’s hands flew off into the night it continued on to slash through Genma’s fat neck and bury itself in the lawn beneath him.

Ranma stepped back to avoid the blood spurting out from the neck stump, and for a time coldly stared down at her father’s head staring up from the center of the bright red pool, then knelt and cut off a piece of Genma’s gi and began cleaning her sword as she walked back toward the Saotome residence, Thought again landing on her shoulder.

/\

Nodoka huddled on the bed, blankets pulled around her, listening desperately for some hint of what was happening outside — there’d been the sound of something smashing through the fence, and something else smashing onto the street, but since then the night had gone deathly silent and she shook as her mind jumped from one possible outcome to another. Then she froze as her daughter strode back through the door, a hard smile on her face as she cleaned the family honor sword’s blade.

“Well, Mom, it looks like you’ll need ta report another training accident to the police,” Ranma said offhandedly, and Nodoka collapsed into a heap, the world going hazy in shock. Grimly, she held onto consciousness, forcing the world back into focus to find the raven from before perched on the bed looking her in the eyes, but ignored it to finally look up at the redhead again leaning against the wall.

Pushing herself back up to a sitting position, Nodoka forced her throat clear and in a husky voice said, “Ranma, I’m pregnant.”

Ranma stiffened, then shrugged. “So I did the kid a favor, he or she won’t have ta worry about being raised by the Panda.” Then, looking over the trembling matron huddling before her, Ranma sighed. “Relax, Mom, I never intended ta hurt ya.” Then, as Nodoka relaxed, continued, “But that doesn’t mean I’m happy with ya, either.”

Ranma began to stiffly pace in what little floor space the bedroom had, fists clenched around the scabbard they held. “Mom,” she snarled, “fer the first few months I was raped at least half a dozen times _a day_ by that monster! That slowed down ta once or twice a week fer awhile before picking up, but that was almost worse — spending day after day doing nothin’ but hangin’ in my niche, wonderin’ every time that bloated bastard came down the hall if he was comin’ fer me and feelin’ ashamed that I was happy when some other poor girl got raped instead. Then, the rate started picking up again, up ta at least once a day by the time the Daimakaicho a’ Hell came in and got me off the wall, cleaned up, and offered me the chance to let my betrayers know what it’s like.”

Ranma stopped pacing and turned to face the bed, her face failing to soften at the sight of her mother once again huddled, arms wrapped around her knees, tears pouring down her face. Her face gone cold, she said, “Now, none a that was yer fault, it was the Panda’s and some others I’m gonna take care of. But there’s somethin’ that was. Rothgan had a favorite story he’d tell me over an’ over, as he was playin’ with my body — how I’d always been as much a tool and plaything ta my parents as I was ta him, and how even as he’d been hauling me down ta his quarters ta ‘try out’ fer the first time the Panda had been standin’ over my corpse cursing me fer a weak, useless failure of a girl and you’d been callin’ the police ta make sure that those that killed me wouldn’t be charged with my murder, ta sweep the whole thing under the rug so ya could get on with makin’ my replacement with the family honor intact.

“Well, I did a lot a' thinkin’ while waitin’ fer him ta pick me out again, and I decided he was right. So, two things — first, fer what it’s worth ya no longer have a child, just like ya never really did, just a path ta fame and easy living fer the Panda and a baby-making machine fer you. So I don’t want nothin’ from you, including the name, I’ll think a’ somethin’ else. And second, I’ll be takin’ this with me,” she said, hefting the Saotome honor blade. “It’ll make a handy pig-sticker. And I’ll be keepin’ an eye on ya and the kid as best I can, and if I like what I see, if I can I’ll return the sword in, say, around nineteen years — when the kid’s as old as I was when ya threw me away.

And with that, the revenant formerly known as Ranma strode from the room, ignoring her former mother crying out the name she’d just abandoned, the raven flying from the bed to the petite girl’s shoulder.

/oOo\

Sitting in her office chair in her inner sanctum, Hild nodded thoughtfully, eyes focused on the mirror on the wall showing Thought’s view of Ranma striding down the main hall of the Saotome home toward the black circle of the gate still open on the family room wall. _So far, so good,_ she thought, smiling grimly with the memory of how effortlessly Ranma had dealt with her father. _Still, don’t get your hopes up — after the deal Genma made with Rothgar and all the years of abuse, this was the easy one._ Then, her smile turned whimsical. _But if Ranma — or rather The Revenant Formerly Known as Ranma — passes her test she’ll make a_ very _interesting fury. That part with the story, abandoning even her birth name and the sword was inspired!_ Standing and stretching, Hild strode toward her sanctum’s door, adding aloud to herself, “So let’s welcome the conquering hero home, maybe that’ll help later.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally, I was going to go with Ranma just having her skill and the strength and speed she'd had when alive. But when I first posted the chapter at Anime Addventures Lyner questioned whether that would be enough for Ranma to win, and while I still think it would that got me to thinking on how soul powers would work differently than ki. So, for this setting at least, the big difference is that ki is energy produced by the body and stored with excess constantly bleeding off (standard, I know), while the soul *is* energy — Ranma isn't a body encasing a soul, she's her soul made solid. This means that, unlike ki, she can't be throwing pieces of herself away as energy bolts. Still, that doesn't mean it can't be projected in a way, like Ranma instinctively did with the sword — covering it with her own essence and essentially making it one with herself for a few seconds. Lyner, thanks for kicking off the inspiration.


	5. The End of the Rivalry

The redheaded revenant formerly known as Ranma strode through the temporary Gate between the Saotome home and the central headquarters of Niflheim, the hilt of the Saotome family sword in one hand and the scabbarded blade leaning against her shoulder, a broad grin on her face, and the raven Thought riding her other shoulder.

The waiting Hild’s eyebrows went up at the sight of the grin. “You’re certainly in a good mood,” she said, smiling slightly. “No uncertainty about carrying out the execution, no hesitation?”

The revenant shook her head. “Nope, not at all, the Panda got exactly what he deserved, and I imagine is getting more now.”

“Yes, he is, the full measure for his sins,” Hild agreed. “Do you want to see?”

Pausing, the prospective fury frowned thoughtfully. “Noooo, I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “It’s enough ta know he’s finally getting what’s comin’ to him, I don’t need ta watch. I might actually start feeling sorry fer the bastard.”

_Good for you,_ Hild thought as she kept her smile in place, feeling her singing tension easing off slightly. _I have plenty of torturers already, I don’t need a fury that gets off on pain. Still, that wasn’t ever a major worry._

Aloud, she asked, “So, do you want a break, or to move right along?”

“No point in waiting,” the redhead said with a shrug. “Let’s get Pig Boy out of the way.”

Hild nodded to the technician standing at a console to the side, and the blond seeming-human tattooed demon’s hands flew across the console.

While her lackey brought down the Gate and worked at opening a new one, Hild nodded at the backpack resting against the wall. “Rethgar said the special equipment you requested for the Ryoga strike is in the backpack. What is it?”

“I think I’ll leave that a surprise,” the revenant said with a light grin after a moment’s thought, first examining then closing and picking up the backpack and slinging it over one shoulder. Then the grin turned ugly, as she snarled, “It’ll help ya enjoy the show.”

/oOo\

Ryoga trudged through the falling snow, ignoring the beauty of the moonlight reflecting off the dusting of white on the evergreens around him as easily as he did the weight of the huge backpack he carried. It was very early morning, dawn still an hour away, but he had no problem finding his way under the trees — the light cast by the faint sickly-green glow he radiated was enough to light his way.

The fanged young man broke into a clearing, lit up by moonlight. He glanced around indifferently then started across, only to freeze at the sound of a still-familiar voice, one that had haunted his dreams for a year. “Hey, P-chan, been awhile since ya helped kill me.”

Whirling, Ryoga stared as a shadow under a tree moved, and his long-time nemesis stepped into the clearing, a large raven riding a small backpack over one shoulder and an unsheathed sword in one hand. “Ranma?” he whispered.

“Used to be, not anymore,” the girl said. “After the way Genma and Nodoka discarded me, I figured I’d return the favor.”

“I ... you ... so what do I call you?” Ryoga stammered out.

The former Saotome glanced over as the raven hopped onto her shoulder and stared at the fanged boy. “Call me Raven,” she said. “It’s as good a name as any, and from what I remember from one lesson in mythology it fits well enough.”

Ryoga stared for another long moment, then started to shake. “Where have you been _hiding_ the past year!?” he shouted out. “Do you have any idea what you did to my life when you ran away and hid? Akane tried to kill me! And Akari, she refuses to even see me ... when she heard what happened she wouldn’t accept that it was your own incompetence that ... that killed you ... how did you fake ... ?”

He stared at the newly-named Raven for a moment, then his face hardened as he shrugged off the straps so his backpack crashed to the ground. “I don’t care! Because of your cowardice my life is in ruins, now I’ve truly seen Hell! Ranma, prepare to die! Shi Shi Hokoden!”

Thought flew up to a nearby tree branch where it could view the action as the newly-named Raven easily dodged, the burning green ball of ki flashing past her to detonate against one of the trees circling the clearing, then cartwheeled away as, with a series of groaning, cracking sounds, the tree slowly leaned over and fell between the two.

Leaping up onto the tree, she shook her head at Ryoga. “Amazin’ how often ya can be wrong in one rant,” she said. “First, I haven’t been hiding, I’ve been dead — ya oughta know, ya helped kill me when ya charged into my fight without botherin’ ta check out what was goin’ on. Second, ya haven’t come close ta seeing Hell yet, but ya will. And third, ya probably think this is yet another of our usual fights, where ya do yer best ta kill me, while I treat it like a lark. It isn’t, it’s an execution.”

With that, Raven dropped down to crouch behind the tree Ryoga had brought down. Swinging the backpack from off her shoulder, she quickly opened it and pulled out a handful of small glass-like round balls even as she scuttled along the tree to its top. She popped up for a quick look just as another shi shi hokodan exploded against the tree trunk where she had been standing.

“Ranma! Come back and DIE!!” Ryoga howled as he threw himself over the tree trunk, a massive ball of ki glowing green between hands cupped at chest level.

“Hey, bacon-breath, over here!” Raven called from the side, and Ryoga whirled and thrust his hands forward, screaming out his hatred as he fired another flaming green ball of ki.

Again, Raven easily dodged, leaping over the coruscating sphere and throwing the three balls in her hand. They smashed into the tree trunk beside Ryoga, and he started, eyes widening, as he felt moisture splash across the back of a hand. As he lifted the hand to stare at the water dripping off, Raven dug into her backpack to pull out another three balls. “Remember how ya got me ta promise not ta tell anyone about yer curse, and then used it ta sneak into Akane’s bed?” the redhead called out. “Ya really shouldn’t have done that. And ya shouldn’t have left yer umbrella with yer backpack, either.”

Ryoga glanced around wildly. The tree wouldn’t work, that redheaded bitch could simply hop back and forth over it; there was no way he could make it to his backpack and get the umbrella loose before being hit — that just left the woods. It would mean abandoning his supplies, but he could always steal more.

Whirling, he raced for the woods, jinking back and forth as he ran. Glass balls flew past him on both sides to turn into globes of water splattering across the tree trunks ahead of him. Then he was at the edge of the clearing, a grin breaking across his face as he was framed by two ancient trees — and he rocked forward as two glass balls smashing into the back of his head held their shape for a split second before turning to water and splashing around him.

The fanged boy’s shout turned into a squeal as he felt the familiar split-second twisting as he fell into the middle of the inevitable pile of clothes. Frantically, he struggled to shake himself out of the shirt, scrabbled out of pants he’d been wearing a second earlier, then the half-grown pig bounded for the woods. He could still make it — and a searing pain slashed through his middle and the world was spinning, and as he thudded into the ground looking back toward the clearing he could barely see his enemy flicking blood off the blade of the sword in her hand as the world went dark.

/\

Raven stared down expressionlessly at the two halves of the young pig lying at her feet, then picked up Ryoga’s shirt to wipe the blade clean and turned back toward where she'd left the scabbard. _And that’s two._

/oOo\

Nabiki swore as the shrilling of the telephone in the hall of the three-bedroom apartment she shared with her sisters woke her from an uneasy sleep. _If Akane has been having one of her good nights and whoever was calling woke her up, he or she is going to regret it,_ she snarled as she rolled out of bed and stumbled out into the hallway. Grabbing the cordless handset by feel in the dark, she lifted it to her head and growled, “This had better be good!”

At the sound of the voice on the other end of the line, Nabiki shot upright, the last of the drowsiness blown away by shock. “Momma Nodoka? Why are you calling so ...” ... “Genma’s what!?” ... “RAN — !” The middle Tendo broke off and lowered her voice to a near-whisper. “Did you say _Ranma_ killed him? _How?_ ” ... “Certainly, come right over, we can put out a futon in the front room.” ... “No, there’s no point in running, if Ranma can find us here, he’ll be able to find us anywhere we can get to quickly. Besides, Akane would demand to know why, and when we tell her she’d refuse to leave.” ... “Listen, just come on over, we can talk it over when you get here.” ... “I love you, too.”

Hanging up the phone, Nabiki turned to find Kasumi standing in the doorway to her bedroom. “You heard?”

Kasumi nodded. “Let me throw on a robe and get water heating for tea, lay out the futon for Mama Nodoka.”


	6. "Honey, I'm home!"

At a former minor Buddhist temple not far from the Nekomi Institute of Technology (at least, if you had a good motorcycle), a young college student stumbled yawning into the kitchen. Rubbing his eyes from the early morning light coming through the windows, he smiled as his lovely brown-haired fiancée called a cheerful greeting and handed him a cup of tea before returning to preparing breakfast. Keiichi had wondered at times why a goddess would know how to cook, but he wasn’t going to argue with the results — not when he could simply sit and delight in watching Belldandy move about the kitchen and enjoy the early morning peace —

“Skuld!! What are you doing in my room?!?!?”

“What do you think? Come on, Urd, where did you hide it?”

“Where did I hide _what_? Don’t touch that!!!”

BA-HOOOM!!!!!

— while it lasted.

“Oh, dear, I had better see what is going on,” Belldandy said with a rueful smile.

Keiichi chuckled, shaking his head in amusement as she rushed from the room toward the sound of coughing as wisps of smoke drifted through the doorway along the ceiling. “That wish was the best joke I ever made, but it’s certainly made life interesting,” he mused.

The sounds of renewed shouting echoed down the hall, though not loud enough to drown out the phone when it rang, and a still chuckling Keiichi picked it up. “Moshi moshi,” he started, then froze. “Uh, yes, Sir, I’ll get her right away!” Putting his hand over the transmitter, he called down the hall, “Belldandy, your father wants to speak to you!”

/\

“So, what did Father want?” Belldandy’s tall, voluptuous (if currently somewhat singed) platinum blonde older sister asked when the middle Norn rejoined her sisters, her fiancé right behind her. The goddess of the past was frowning slightly at the complete absence of her younger sister’s normal gentle smile.

“Yeah, it must be serious!” a suddenly nervous Skuld added. The dark-haired seeming-child was much older that she looked, and while she had seen her older sister when she was angry (scary!), sad, happy, loving (often when looking at Keiichi, ick!), disappointed and fearful, she couldn’t remember a time she had seen Belldandy’s face without any expression at all.

“He had an assignment for me, I will be gone most of the day. I’ve rushed the breakfast I was preparing, it’s waiting for you,” Belldandy replied in almost a monotone. “Urd, Father had an assignment for you, as well. It seems your mother is recruiting a new Fury. Father wants you to read his — her — file and observe her final test. Her self-chosen name is now Raven, but she was formerly Saotome Ranma.”

Without another word, she turned and stepped into Urd’s now-cracked full-length mirror and was gone, leaving one human male and two goddesses exchanging worried glances.

/oOo\

In Nyucheizu, a large village hidden in the Bayankala Range, a _very_ old woman stirred with a groan as the early morning light coming through the window edged across her face. _I had forgotten how ... interesting ... a newborn makes things at any and all hours_ , she thought as she cracked open her eyes to gaze up at the ceiling.

As if on cue, the newest addition to her line squalled out her renewed hunger, her cries easily penetrating the house’s thin interior walls. They were quickly followed by the sounds of the baby’s mother hastily rising from the bed she shared with her husband of less than a year, and within moments the cries were cut off as presumably her great-great-granddaughter drank her breakfast.

With a sigh, the Amazon matriarch rose from her own bed. She briefly considered waiting for Mu Tse to rise and prepare breakfast, but quickly decided against it — the meals in her home had been tense affairs lately, soured by her suspicions about the death of Xian Pu’s previous husband a year earlier. She simply hadn’t been able to stop wondering over how quickly Mu Tse had replaced Ranma in her great-granddaughter’s heart, and the questions she couldn’t bring herself to ask had created a wall between herself and the two teenagers. All in all, better to go hungry until lunch and be free of the household’s atmosphere.

Taking up her staff, Ku Lon pogoed out into the kitchen and grabbed some leftovers from the previous night’s dinner, then left for the training field where she had been training the youngest girls in the beginnings of the martial arts that all Amazon warriors learned. It was far from the prestigious duties her years as an Elder entitled her to, but she had not complained — after the Nerima fiasco she counted herself lucky to still be on the Council.

As she approached the field, a young child ran up to her, one she recognized from her classes — Ting Shu. “Elder Ku Lon! Elder Ku Lon! Come quick! There’s a Seeker of Justice at the front gate asking for you!” the girl called out excitedly. “It’s the Godkiller!”

Ku Lon carefully didn’t react at the words even as she felt her heart sink. There could be only one reason Ranma had returned from the dead, and come _here_ , and the Seekers of Justice were not always particularly discriminating in their quests. Ranma alive had grown powerful enough to require the entire Council to deal with if he’d turned against the village; a Ranma returned from the dead with all that entailed was infinitely worse, and if he blamed the Joketsuzoku en mass for what had happened to him....

Ting Shu hadn’t waited for a reply from her teacher, turning as soon as she had shouted her message to rush back toward the gate, and Ku Lon pogoed in her wake, quickly overtaking and passing her student. Reaching the still-closed gate, she bounded to the walkway above it, landing on the shoulder of one of the guards, and looked down, her heart sinking even lower at the sight awaiting her.

Rather than the figure of a dark-haired young man Ku Lon had expected, she found the fiery-haired girl Ranma had been cursed to turn into, a katana the matriarch recognized as the sword Ranma's mother had carried slung across her back, and she suddenly realized that in the retellings of how Ranma had come to die, neither Xian Pu nor Mu Tse had said just which form she’d been wearing. Nor had any member of the Council thought to ask.

And to make matters even worse, there was the large raven riding the redhead’s shoulder — the bird radiated Power, such that combined with what the girl it was with had become there was only one bird it could be. Ku Lon wondered for a brief moment how Ranma had gained the Queen of Hell’s personal attention before she forced the distraction aside as irrelevant.

Ting Shu had dashed up the stairs to the walkway, and was now bouncing up and down, trying to get high enough to see over the parapet, exclaiming, “I wanna see! I wanna see!” in her high-pitched child’s voice.

Glancing down at the eager girl, Ku Lon couldn’t help but smile at the spectacle even now. “Li Hwan, lift her up for a moment, let her get a look. And Ting Shu,” she continued after pausing for a moment to make room for the girl’s squeal of delight, “Once you’ve had your look, go find Dou Jan, and then the rest of the Council and let them know what’s happening. _And then_ I want you to go home,” she added as the child pouted. “This is adult business, you aren’t nearly old enough yet. Promise?”

She glared sternly until Ting Shu reluctantly nodded, then nodded to Li Hwan. The guard set her spear aside and lifted the child up.

The young girl stared down in awe at the redheaded figure below, then impulsively waved. Ranma had been gazing up at the guards above the gate the entire time, and Ku Lon felt the singing tension at her heart ease when the spirit smiled and waved back. Whatever was to come, she didn’t have to worry about Ranma holding the entire village responsible for the sins of her great-granddaughter.

/\

Raven patiently waited outside the closed main gate to Nyucheizu, gazing up at the guards atop the wall. She wouldn’t have been so patient, of course, or waited for hours before arriving for that matter, if it hadn’t been for the deal Hild-sama had told her about when she had returned from her execution of P-chan and announced that Shampoo and Mousse were her next targets. Apparently, there had been a revenant that the Amazons kept from his target, at the cost of half their warriors and a third of the Elders. Afterwards, the surviving Elders had summoned Hild-sama herself to ask why the ranting lunatic of a revenant had returned, and what they could do to prevent a follow-up visit. The result had been the execution of the revenant’s target, and Hild-sama had agreed to have future visiting revenants announce themselves at the gates.

Suddenly a familiar shrunken figure bounced up to land on a shoulder of one guard to gaze down at the waiting revenant. Ku Lon said something in a tone too low for Raven to hear, and few moments later the other guard leaned down and lifted up a girl-child. The child stared down at her for a moment, then hesitantly waved. Raven smiled and waved back, and the child clapped her hands in delight before the guard lowered the young girl back down out of sight. A moment later, Ku Lon hopped from her perch to the top of the parapet, then dropped down to the road leading to the gate and pogoed toward the waiting redhead.

“Well, Ranma, I must say that you have surprised me yet again,” the old woman said quietly when she reached the revenant. “However did you come to the attention of the Queen of Hell? While you were no saint, I would have expected you to have a different final destination.”

Raven’s face froze. “The name’s Raven, now. Shampoo an’ Mousse didn’t tell ya about the demon that showed up ta haul me off ta Hell after Ryoga and Mousse got done choppin’ me up?” she demanded.

“No, they didn’t,” Ku Lon said with a sigh. “It seems there was quite a lot they left out. How did a demon end up with a claim to your soul? I wouldn’t have expected you to have dealings with such.”

“No, but Pop did, usin’ my soul instead a’ his,” Raven ground out.

“I see.” Ku Lon glanced at the hilt of the katana. “From the sword you’re carrying I take it you already dealt with your father before coming here?”

“Yeah, and the Pig Boy, too. C’mon, Ole Ghoul, let’s get this over with, I still got another stop.” Raven’s voice was arctic cold, something the Amazon Elder had never heard before from the Ranma she’d known, and she abandoned all hope of convincing the revenant to give up her vengeance. She simply bowed, motioned to the guards to order the gates opened, then silently led the two Ravens into the village.


	7. As you sow, so will you reap.

Gently holding Li Tai, her baby eagerly suckling at her breast, Xian Pu sighed as she listened to her great grandmother moving about, from her bedroom to the kitchen, and out the front door. It seemed she and her husband wouldn’t have the pleasure of the presence of the head of her family at breakfast — again.

_Not that Great-grandmother’s presence has been that much of a pleasure lately,_ the teenager thought. _She knows Mu Tse and I conspired to kill Ranma. I don’t know how, but she knows. And what happens to my future advancement in the tribe if she refuses to provide even such support as she can after Nerima?_

Careful not to disturb her child, the purple-haired girl leaned over and shook the shoulder of her snoring husband. Mu Tse was instantly awake and reaching for his glasses (she had finally convinced him being able to tell her from a wooden pole was worth the hit to his pride). Slipping on the coke-bottle lenses, he smiled happily at the mother-and-child scenery they revealed. “Now, _that’s_ the proper way to wake up,” he murmured, and his wife gently punched him in the shoulder.

“Our little one isn’t the only one that’s hungry,” she informed him with a laugh in her voice. “Time to get breakfast — just for two.” Mu Tse grimaced at the news and rose to throw on a robe, pausing only long enough to gently run his hand along the back of his daughter’s head and give his wife a soft kiss before heading for the kitchen.

/\

Xian Pu had just put her contentedly full and once again sleeping daughter in a cradle by a wall in the main room and was sitting down at the table for the simple breakfast Mu Tse was preparing, when the couple heard a knock on the door.

Mu Tse hurried over to open the door, froze, then stepped back and bowed deeply. “Elder Li Ku, welcome to our home,” he said respectfully. “But I’m sorry to say that Elder Ku Lon has already left for the training field, you should find her there.”

“I am not here for the Elder,” the tiny wizened old woman balancing on her staff replied coldly. “Xian Pu, Mu Tse, your presence is required by the Council at the training field.”

Xian Pu stiffened at the lack of her title as Champion in the summons, but rose to her feet. “We will come immediately, of course,” she responded calmly. Turning, she carefully lifted her child from the cradle even as her mind raced, trying to figure out what could have caused the Council to so suddenly turn hostile.

A few minutes later the two teenagers approached the training field, Elder Li Ku pogoing ahead and two warriors that had come with her walking behind the two. Xian Pu was now fighting down rising panic — she still had no idea what was happening, but the empty streets they had walked along told her it was serious.

Then they turned onto the final street leading to the field, to find their view blocked by a line of warriors running along the field’s edge. As they approached the warriors parted, faces cold. The little party passed through the opening, the line reforming behind them, and Xian Pu and Mu Tse slammed to a stop at the sight now revealed — a _very_ familiar redheaded Japanese girl waiting in the middle of the field, a bared katana in her hand and a large raven on her shoulder, beside Elder Ku Lon balancing in her staff.

Xian Pu looked around wildly, only to find the field completely surrounded by warriors, an elder in front of the line every dozen feet or so. Her hold on her armful tightened to the point that the baby woke up, wailing at the pressure, and the teenager forced her grip to relax, gently bouncing Li Tai and murmuring to her until her crying died away and the little one smiled up at her mother and burbled happily.

“Xian Pu, Mu Tse, stand forth for one demanding justice!” her great-grandmother intoned loudly in Japanese. “A Seeker of Justice formerly known as Saotome Ranma, now named Raven, has come seeking one that had conspired at her murder, and one that carried it out.”

Xian Pu and Mu Tse exchanged despairing glances, and with a sigh Xian Pu turned to one of the warriors behind her — a lifelong friend but her face now as cold as the rest — and offered Li Tai to her. “Tai Tai, whatever I may or may not have done, your namesake has done nothing. Will you guard her?” After a long moment, Tai Tai nodded, face softening. Handing her spear to the warrior next to her, she took the baby in her arms. Holding Li Tai in the crook of an arm, Tai Tai tickled her under the chin, bringing out a happy gurgle. Xian Pu and Mu Tse each placed a hand gently on their child’s head for a brief moment. “Grow straight and strong, my little one,” Xian Pu murmured, then the couple turned to again face the two waiting for them in the middle of the field.

When the couple reached the elder and revenant patiently waiting, Ku Lon continued in Japanese in a voice leached of all emotion, “The accuser and accused have met, let Justice be done.” Without another glance at her daughter and son-in-law, she pogoed around them as the raven silently took off from Raven’s shoulder.

Raven watched the old woman cross the field to settled beside Tai Tai and her great-great-granddaughter, the raven settling onto Tai Tai’s shoulder, then refocused on her prey. “Let’s get this over with, I still got a last visit ta Naerima,” she said in a voice cold with hatred.

“I not have my weapons,” Xian Pu protested.

“Turn around.”

Xian Pu turned to find a warrior carrying the two chúi she had left at home, mothers with newborns being exempt from the requirement for warriors to be armed at all times. With another sigh, she accepted them and turned back as the warrior backed away. “My baby?”

“Yer kid’ll be fine, I’m not gonna hurt her.”

Xian Pu’s shoulders slumped slightly in relief, then she straightened and took a deep breath. “As Ran — as Raven say, ‘let’s get this over with’.” Without warning, her chúi whipped around toward the revenant from each side, only to have Raven drop into a crouch. The chúi aimed at her head brushed her flame-red hair as it passed overhead while the heavy iron sphere of the chúi aimed at her thigh pinwheeled down the field when her katana slammed into the handle edge-on.

Mu Tse desperately twisted, breaking off his own charge forward with swords in hand, when the katana that had just cut through his wife’s weapon looped around and sliced open his robe across his chest. The two Amazons fell back, breaking contact with Raven, their eyes widening at the sight of the suddenly pitch-black blade in the revenant’s hand.

Xian Pu felt despair washing over her at the failure of the best chance the pair had to win, a voice in her mind telling her to just give it up, charge in and die, to get it over with. _No!_ she told herself as her lips pulled back in a teeth-revealing snarl. _I may die, but I will go down as an Amazon!_ She glanced over at her husband out of the corner of her eye, and seeing that his attention was partially on her she moved her head in a circular motion. He didn’t acknowledge her signal, but fell back further and began to circle as Xian Pu again slipped forward toward their patiently waiting enemy.

Raven turned to follow Mu Tse until Xian Pu was at the edge of her peripheral vision. Just as the redhead started to step to the side to keep Mu Tse in sight, Xian Pu charged forward, undamaged chúi again swinging at Raven’s head and the handle of the other coming in at her side.

To the Amazon girl’s shock Raven dropped her katana, one hand slamming into the underside of the handle of the undamaged chúi to divert it up and away while the other hand grabbed at the front of Xian Pu’s tunic. The revenant ignored the headless handle, grunting as it smashed into her ribs, instead falling back and pulling Xian Pu forward. Then the redhead’s feet slammed into her stomach and thrust her upward, and all the air left her lungs as two heavy blows smashed into her breasts.

Xian Pu landed on her feet and staggered, looked down, and her eyes went wide at the sight of the hilts of two of her husband’s heaviest throwing knives flush against her chest. She looked up toward Mu Tse as she heard him scream, only to find Raven in front of her, yanking the knives free and stepping back and to the side as blood poured down the Amazon’s torso. “I had a lot of time ta think, over the past year hangin’ on Rothgan’s wall waitin’ fer the next rape. Did ya actually think I didn’t figure out just what you two did?” the revenant asked, but Xian Pu ignored her. _Airen!_ she tried to shout, but her mouth was full of blood and she couldn’t get air into her lungs and the darkening ground was rising to slam into her face....

/\

Raven stepped back, away from the corpse at her feet, readying herself for an assault as Mu Tse charged toward them. But the Amazon ignored her, falling to his knees and gathering his wife’s body into his arms.

With a sigh, the redhead relaxed and turned to step over and pick up the Saotome honor blade. She turned back to where Mu Tse was gently stroking purple hair as he stared into his wife’s unseeing eyes. With an effortless slash, his head rolled across the field as his blood-spurting torso collapsed across Xian Pu’s body.

For a few minutes Raven simply stood there, gazing down at the two corpses, then cut off a piece of Mu Tse’s robe and wiped the katana clean of blood. Task complete, she walked over and picked up the sheath, sheathed the sword, then turned toward the edge of the field where Tai Tai stood with LXian Pu's baby in her arms. She walked forward with her eyes fixed on the two only to stop when Ku Lon stepped in front of her without saying a word. The revenant stared down at a her longtime nemesis and trainer for a long moment, then chuckled. “Ya can relax, ol’ ghoul. I told Shampoo I wouldn’t hurt her kid, and I meant it.”

Ku Lon silently gazed up at her for a time, then stepped aside. “If you aren’t going to take your revenge on the child, why are you interested in her?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“ ‘Cause I’m gonna help her,” Raven replied. She stepped forward and crooked her arm while gazing fixedly at Tai Tai, and after a moment’s hesitation the warrior placed the baby in the revenant’s arm. Raven gazed down at the infant and smiled. “I’m gonna take her away from this backwater hellhole an’ give her ta someone that’ll raise her ta be a human being with a future instead of a killing machine defendin’ a dying people.” Lifting her head, gaze hardening as she stared at the warriors in front of her, she asked, “Anybody got a problem with that?”

There was no reply, but the warriors stepped aside, opening a way off of the field. Raven strode through the opening and turned down the road toward the front gates, ignoring the ancient crone pogoing along behind her.

When they reached the gates, Ku Lon nodded to the guards to open them and bounced to the ramparts above as the revenant strode through and across the fields toward the surrounding forest. The elder watched until the last sight of the flaming red hair disappeared into the trees with what little was left of the ancient woman’s future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't claim to have thought up this general situation myself, I got it from a Western I read many years ago, where a gunfighter's wedding was interrupted by some old enemies that caught him with his guard down, raped his bride and then killed the both of them — they thought. Years later, when a gunman starts hunting the members of the gang, he finds one of them living as a farmer, married with a baby.


	8. Side Trips

Belldandy stood on the crest of the snow- and pine-covered hill overlooking the isolated farmhouse below, the light from its windows shining out into the Rocky Mountain dusk.

Beside her, a grim-faced goddess with three circles tattooed into her forehead, dressed in a white bodysuit and holding a tall polearm in her hands, finished giving instructions to the other gods and goddesses — Valkyries all — gathered around them, all armed with a variety of spears, polearms and swords: “ ... and remember, there are no innocents in that house — every living soul inside is to be sent to Hild.”

At Belldandy’s involuntary light mew of protest, Lind glanced over at her, stern expression seeming to soften slightly. “We have to, my friend, you know this — we cannot leave these already-damned fools to try this again.”

Belldandy nodded jerkily, and Lind turned back to the rest. “Hallkell, Melkorka, stay here to watch over Belldandy — I can’t imagine what might be around that could touch her, but let’s not take chances.” When a god and goddess nodded stoically and stepped over to flank the gentle brown-haired goddess on each side, Lind ordered, “Everyone else, let’s go.”

As Belldandy watched sadly, the rest of the pack vanished into the trees in both directions as they left to circle the farmhouse. Just before Lind followed, she turned back to her friend and now there was nothing ‘slight’ about her expression of sympathy. “Belldandy, I know this isn’t what you were made for, but be strong, it’ll be over soon enough ... and please don’t ever change.” Then Lind, too, vanished from sight into the gathering night.

/\

After a time that seemed to both take forever to arrive and come much too soon, Belldandy stepped into the farmhouse, Hallkell leading and his partner in the rear. At first there was no sign that only a few minutes before the house had been the scene of a massacre, until they reached the kitchen to find a spotless Lind waiting for them. The valkyrie was standing in a doorway to stairs leading down from a room with the walls, counters, floor, even ceiling liberally splashed with blood and the pieces of perhaps three women scattered about.

Lind took one look at Belldandy’s pinched, white face and stepped forward to place a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Easy, Bell, take a moment — I am afraid the cellar is worse.”

Belldandy’s face blanched even further, but after a moment she drew a deep breath and nodded sharply. “I’m ready.” For a moment, Lind’s eyes stayed fixed searchingly on her friend’s face, then she nodded in return. “Hallkell, Melkorka, wait up here, there isn’t really room below.” Belldandy’s two escorts nodded and moved to stand at either side of the entrance to the stairs, and Lind led Belldandy downward.

The two goddesses stepped into the farmhouse’s cellar, and Lind had been right — it was _much_ worse. The Norn didn’t even try to estimate from the pieces how many men and women had been in the room when the Valkyrie had invaded, but other than the Valkyrie floating at each corner there was now only one body still whole — a young woman lying naked and spread-eagled on a large altar in the middle of the room, a massive wound running from her collarbone to her crotch, her unseeing, drying eyes staring up at a tiny pure-white star floating six feet above her abdomen.

Instantly, Belldandy’s eyes fixed on the star and she rose into the air and floated across the room above a floor awash in blood and arms, legs, heads.... she was so focused on her goal that she didn’t notice when Lind swung her polearm so that its blade shielded her from the blood dripping from the ceiling. “Be at ease, little one, I’m here now,” Belldandy crooned softly as she reached out her hands to cup them around the bobbing light, projecting her love and care. The light seemed to flicker slightly, a questioning feeling sweeping through the cellar, and the brown-haired goddess nodded. “Yes, whatever comes you have my love. Now come with me, let me take you to your new home.” The questioning feeling shifted to a happy contentment, and when she pulled her hands toward her chest, the tiny star followed to nestle against her chest.

The Norn turned to float back toward the stairs, and was soon back upstairs and being escorted out of the house by Lind, the other six Valkyrie following behind.

The small parade stepped out of the house’s side door into the half-circle of the rest of the strike team, and the flickering star resting against Belldandy’s chest seemed to shrink and dim under the impact of the hatred that sprang into the eyes of the gods and goddesses when they saw Belldandy’s new ward. Belldandy glared back even as she tightened her hands protectively around the light as its fear washed out. “Enough, you’re scaring the little one!” she shouted.

“Little one?!” one of the Valkyries cried out. “That’s the Demon’s Seed, the gateway to the end of the world!”

“And how many of us chose our parents?” Belldandy responded instantly. “Ask Urd, sometime. No, whoever its father is and whatever he may have programmed into it, this child is innocent!” Then focusing on the fearfully flickering star she cupped to her chest, she murmured, “Don’t worry, little one, nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“Enough!” Lind ordered as the goddess that had spoken up opened her mouth to shout out her rebuttal, placing a hand on Belldandy’s shoulder and glaring at her errant subordinate until her mouth snapped shut. “Good. This assignment is complete. I will escort Belldandy to the Seed’s new home, the rest of you sanitize this site and return to Asgard.”

After a moment Lind’s team all nodded, and Belldandy’s last view before following Lind through the portal was of the farmhouse suddenly awash in white-hot fire.

/oOo\

Raven walked through the portal from the forest around Nyucheizu into Niflhiem, stepping carefully to avoid waking up the baby she cradled in an arm. Thought flew through behind her, and the redhead looked around the room as the portal vanished.

“Nicely done, Raven,” Hild complimented from where she was sitting, office chair tilted back and her crossed legs resting on the desk (Raven carefully ignored the way her split dress fell away on both sides of her firm legs). One hand clicked a remote, and the screen hung on the wall that showed a swooping view of the room they were in turned off. “I’m beginning to think that you may be wasted as a fury — your little sidelines are as to the point as your attacks are brutally effective. But that’s for the future,” she added with a smirk, swinging her legs off the desk and straightening up to lean forward, elbows on the desk and chin cupped in her hands. “Just what are you going to do with your new kid? I’d suggest using our daycare while you finish off Akane, but we don’t exactly have daycare facilities in Niflheim.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured,” Raven replied with a one-shouldered shrug, Thought bouncing momentarily on her perch. “I’ll just hafta drop it off on the way ta Akane. Can ya have the next portal open up close to Ucchan’s?”

Hild looked thoughtful for a brief moment, then quirked an eyebrow at the technician standing behind the console to the side. He quickly started typing away, paused, frowned, and looked up only to freeze with his mouth open at the Daimakaicho’s suddenly flat stare. “Well?” she asked calmly.

The technician swallowed and hastily looked down, again typing hurriedly. After several minutes he nodded jerkily, eyes still fixed on his control panel. “Yes, Mistress, one portal two blocks west of Ucchan’s coming up.”

Raven turned to face the way she’d come, Thought flapping her wings for a moment to keep her balance, and a moment later the now familiar oval portal sprang into existence. A few carefully gliding strides and the redheaded revenant was gone, and the portal shut down.

Hild stared reflectively at the empty space for a long moment. _I wonder if I should have told her about Ukyo-san’s suicide?_ she wondered. _It isn’t like she isn’t going to find out herself soon enough. True, the impact on her will be greater this way, hopefully help push her all the way with Akane, and I can honestly say that my staff didn’t bring it to my attention if she asks, but she’s proving surprisingly insightful — what if she doesn’t buy it? The scene here with that idiot technician could clue her in._

Finally, the Daimakaicho of Niflheim shrugged with a sigh. _I’ve done what I can, from here on things will be as they will be. But I think I’ll watch the rest of this one work out in person._ Rising to her feet, she strode to a viewscreen in the wall and hit a prominent red button beneath it. The screen lit up to show her latest not-so-bubbleheaded blonde secretary, looking up hastily from her desk. “Victoria, I’ll be out of the office for the next few hours,” Hild said with a cheery smile.

“Of course, Mistress,” Victoria responded instantly, bowing her head slightly, hiding questioning eyes.

Hild pressed the red button again and stared at the now blank screen for a long moment. _Hmmm ... it looks like Victoria’s beginning to ask herself questions, good. At least_ something _good is coming out of this, whatever else happens._ Then a portal opened beneath her feet and she dropped out of sight, leaving the steel-tense technician alone in the room, doing his best not to collapse in relief across his control panel into a puddle of sweat.


	9. You can't go "home" again.

In an alley in the Nerima district of Tokyo, a dark circle silently appeared on a wall. A few seconds later a short, busty redheaded girl stepped through it, a katana across her back, a baby in her arms, and a large raven on her shoulder. Stepping away from the opening, Raven glanced around — nobody in sight. Not that that was going to matter, as soon as she stepped out onto the sidewalk....

She glanced down at the sleeping baby with a soft smile. “Okay, kid, let’s get you dropped off with Auntie Ukyo, then I can get this over with and we can both get on with our new lives. Hopefully, my duties as a fury’ll let me drop in every so often and see how you’re doin’, along with Mom’s — along with Nodoka-san’s rugrat.”

Stepping out of the alley, she ignored the gasps of shock and stunned expressions of the pedestrians — and the car that swerved out of control to smash into a display window — as she looked around to orient herself and nodded. _Two blocks west, just like he said._ As she strode along the sidewalk, she wondered if a disembodied spirit made solid could still eat. She hoped so — she hadn’t had a single bite since she was murdered, and Ukyo had always made the best okonomiyaki she’d ever tasted. And at this time of day, Ukyo should have just opened for the early lunch crowd.

A few minutes’ eager walk with Thought flight-hopping along alongside from sign to telephone wire to rooftop, and Raven almost stumbled as the familiar storefront came into view. It looked the same, but there were no lights on inside and there was a large ‘For Sale’ sign in the window — one that had been there awhile, from the way it had faded.

_Well, damn!_ The revenant simply stood and stared for a time, until the baby in her arm shifted slightly in its sleep. Glancing down at the little bundle, Raven sighed. _Guess I shoulda put more thought about where I wanted ta go,_ she thought. _Ukyo must of moved and not be open with a new place, yet. I’ll just hafta wait till after I take care of Akane._

Briefly, she considered taking to the roofs to get it over with that much faster, then glanced down at the baby again before reluctantly deciding to go on foot. It wouldn’t take _that_ much more time, but she didn’t know how much longer the baby would stay asleep....

/\

Raven stared in stunned silence at the Tendo compound. At least, it _had_ been the Tendo compound, green and fringed by the colorful flowers that Kasumi had carefully tended, shade trees ... now, it was a fenced-off area of naked earth filled with construction equipment and the rising skeleton of a new apartment building, at least according to the sign.

Finally, the redhead took a deep breath. “Great, what do I do _now_?” she snarled. Deciding there wasn’t much point in simply standing there, she turned away and began ambling along, deep in thought, considering who might know where the Tendos had moved to. Tofu, gone before she died. Amazons, gone. Ukyo, gone. Either one of the Kuno siblings would probably know, their insane obsessions would lead them to keep track of the Tendos in the hope that her ‘Ranma-sama’ would show up, in Kodachi’s case, or that with the ‘foul sorcerer’ dead his ‘fair Akane might awaken from her bespelled state’, for Tatewaki. Unfortunately, the operative word was ‘insane’, and Raven _really_ didn’t want to have to deal with either — especially not with a baby in her arms. If she returned to Niflheim before dealing with Akane, would that count as a failure and put her back on the wall?

Suddenly, she was jarred from her circling ruminations. Stepping back from whatever she had walked into and looking up, she found herself staring at the front gates of Furinkan High School as Thought landed on the wall and seemed to caw a laugh at her — sheer habit had had her walking the usual route to school. _Idiot! You were so busy thinkin’ a’ who ya could ask, ya didn’t think a’ where else Akane might be. An’ even if she isn’t here, her friends will be,_ they _should know where ta find her._

/\

Looking away from the window yet again, a brown-haired, ponytailed girl did her best to force her attention back to Tani-sensei’s lecture, only to have her eyes drift down toward the top of her desk — normally, math was one of her better subjects; today, she just hoped he wouldn’t call on her, not after Nabiki’s early morning phone call. Even now, Sayuri didn’t know if she hoped or feared it would work out the way the former Mercenary Tendo thought it might.

_Should I have told Yuka about Nabiki’s call?_ she wondered yet again, feeling the weight of her friend’s worried gaze out of the corner of the light brown-haired girl’s eye from the adjacent desk. Yet again, she rejected the rut-worn thought. Yuka was a loyal friend but no actress — not even as good as Sayuri, much less Akane — and if Ranma showed up ...

Suddenly, she was shaken from her ruminations as the class fell silent, Tani-sensei breaking off his lecture in mid-sentence. Looking up and glancing around, she froze at the sight of a familiar petite if busty redhead standing in the classroom doorway, a raven on her shoulder, check, the hilt of a katana visible over the other shoulder, check ... and a baby in her arms? !

The impossible redhead glanced around the classroom, then focused back on Sayuri and a stunned Yuka in the desk next to her. “Yuka-kun, Sayuri-kun, we need ta talk,” she said in a voice of frozen helium.

Sayuri looked over at Tani-sensei, and the teacher jerkily nodded. “Of course, take as long as you need,” he said in a shaking voice. “I’ll pass the word to Kubo-sensei if you aren’t back by the end of class so he won’t mark you down as delinquent for his class and can pass it on if needed.”

Suppressing a sigh, Sayuri stood. _Yeah, don’t we have the most courageous, protective teachers in all Japan?!_ she thought sardonically as she turned to her friend, still frozen in shock in her seat. “Come on, Yuka, let’s see what Ranma-kun wants.”

/\

Raven turned around to face the two girls that had followed her out onto the school grounds, Thought settling on a low-hung branch of the tree the three girls were standing under. “I get back ta Nerima, and find Ucchan’s shut down and construction where the dojo used ta be, what the hell’s happened? !” she demanded abruptly, then winced at her choice of words.

Yuka and Sayuri exchanged glances. You don’t know? !” they exclaimed in unison.

“Would I be askin’ if I did?” the revenant growled, and Sayuri winced. “So where’s Ukyo?”

“I ... I ... she ... she’s dead,” Yuka managed to stammer out, face pale.

Raven froze, swaying in place. “Dead?” she whispered. “When ... how ... ?”

Sayuri glanced at her shivering friend, then stepped forward to place a steadying hand on the revenant’s shoulder. “It was shortly after you ... you were murdered,” she replied. “When she heard what happened, sh-she committed seppuku.”

“Seppuku ...” Raven repeated, then drew a deep breath as she straightened. “So what happened to Konatsu?”

“Who?”

“Her ... waitress, I guess, the cross dresser that worked for her. He would a’ been her kaishakunin.”

Sayuri looked blankly at the redhead for a moment, then said, “I don’t know who you’re talking about. From what the news reports had to say, she didn’t have a second.”

_No kaishakunin._ Raven closed her eyes in pain at the thought, then opened them to get rid of the image of her best friend writhing on her restaurant floor, jaw locked against screams of pain, intestines spilling from the massive slash she’d have made in her abdomen with one of her throwing spatulas, with no one there to behead her at the moment of the crosscut.... Eyes on the ponytailed girl’s face, the revenant realized that Sayuri was still talking.

“ ... just lucky Akane didn’t follow Ukyo-kun’s example, not completely,” the other girl was saying. “She felt that after what she had done seppuku was too good a death — that she didn’t deserve to enter the next life with her honor washed clean — and so she slit her wrists instead. Praise the kami, she didn’t know how to do it properly and her sisters found her before she bled out.”

Raven’s grip on the baby in her arms had been tightening as the revelations hammered into her, and suddenly the tiny bundle woke under the pressure and let out a squall that made the girls jump. Yuka stared as Raven hastily started rocking the crying baby, making hushing sounds like she must have seen young mothers do, and the schoolgirl began to reluctantly chuckle at the sight of panic on the revenant’s face. “I take it the baby isn’t yours,” she commented wryly, reaching out her arms. “Here, give him — her? — to me.”

A relieved Raven handed over the still-squalling baby, and Yuka frowned at the damp feel of the cloth diaper (and who still used cloth diapers in this day and age?). And yes, there was definitely a smell indicating that ‘damp’ wasn’t the only problem. “Where did you stash your baby supplies?” she asked. When Raven looked at her in confusion, she sighed. “You don’t have any? Definitely not your baby. Do you even know how to change one? What’s his name?”

Raven reach up to tug at her pigtail, looking abashed. “No, I don’t have any supplies. Actually, I don’t know the name or sex, either. The parents didn’t give me a name before ... they died.”

Yuka glanced searchingly at the redhead, then shrugged. “I guess since I’m the one with a baby brother, I get the job. Sayuri, do you have any cash available? My card’s maxed out for the month.”

/\

Raven and Sayuri watched as a grimacing Yuka rolled up the soiled diaper and threw it in the nearest park garbage can before returning to wipe down the now-revealed-to-be baby girl and wrap on the clean — and thoroughly disposable — diaper that had turned out not to cost a single yen. The terrified owner of the corner shop had taken one look at the armed Raven and the still-crying baby and insisted they take whatever they needed.

As the baby girl settled down and began happily gurgling at Yuka’s tickling attentions from where it lay on the blanket-covered grass, Raven quietly asked, “What happened ta the Tendo dojo?”

Sayuri sighed. “The Tendos lost their home when they couldn’t pay the inheritance tax after Tendo-san got drunk one night a few months after ... well, he walked in front of a truck. Kasumi, Nabiki and Akane moved into an apartment.”

Raven stared at her in shock. Sure, Tendo Soun hadn’t been at Ranma’s eventual level, or even at Genma’s when they’d first shown up. Sure, he had gotten a little soft and out of practice since the death of his wife. Still, he had been at least at Kuno’s level, at the speed trucks could move on city streets he should have taken the hit and ... well, maybe not walked away, but slept it off, even — _Even if he was drunk?_ the redhead thought, remembering the time he’d gotten more than a little tipsy, the trouble he’d had moving, controlling himself, and considered trying to control ki when drunk. Okay, maybe that _was_ plausible.

Sayuri had been watching the play of emotions across Raven’s face. “Why?” she asked. “I’d think that after what happened, they’re the last people you’d want to see.”

“I ... have business with Akane,” Raven said shortly, voice suddenly as cold as when she’d first shown up at the school, and Sayuri gave her a sharp look as Yuka looked up from where she had been packing up the diaper bag.

“You’re here to kill her, aren’t you?” Sayuri enquired.

Yuka blanched as Raven nodded. “Yeah, I am. D’ya blame me?”

“No ... no, I don’t. Neither will Akane, for that matter.” Sayuri waved off Yuka’s mew of protest. “You know it’s true, Yuka — I don’t know what Nabiki said to her after her suicide attempt, but you _know_ how she’ll feel about it! If the price of getting Ranma out of hell is her life, she’ll be happy to pay it.”

Her face was stony, expressionless, but a slow tear from each eye trickled down her face, and Yuka finally nodded. “You’re right,” she reluctantly agreed.

Raven stared at the two girls for a long moment, then leaned over and gently scooped the baby up in her arms. “Thanks a lot fer helpin’ with the kid,” she said as she slung the diaper bag over a shoulder and stood up. “You girls go ahead an’ get back ta school.”

Sayuri drew in a shuddering breath. “You aren’t going to ask us where Akane lives?” she asked.

“Naw, I don’t want ya girls any more involved in this than ya already are,” Raven replied. _Besides, I can just check any phone book or check with any a’ the storekeepers Kasumi likes ta buy from._

She turned and started to walk away, only to pause when Sayuri called out, “Ranma!”

Without turning around, she said, “Yeah?”

“I can’t wish you good luck, but ... kami bless.”

Raven nodded acknowledgment without speaking, then strode off toward the park entrance.

The two girls silently watched her leave. As soon as the revenant was out of sight, Sayuri pulled out her cell phone, flipped it open, and hit the speed dial. “Nabiki, you called it, Ranma showed up at the school —” ... “Yes, it was definitely Ranma, and I managed to work in the tidbits you wanted me to tell him.” ... “No, he was in his girl form —” ... “Yeah, _she’s_ headed for you right now —” ... “ _No_ , we didn’t tell her where you live now, but she won’t have much trouble finding out.” She quickly related what had just happened, then paused. “That’s okay, you have a right to be a bit snappish. Good luck.”

Closing her phone and turning back to her friend, she said, “Come on, Yuka, let’s get back to school.  We’ve done what we can, now all we can do is wait and pray for the best.”


	10. New Pieces on the Board

From a nearby tree on the grounds of the Hikawa shrine, a confused Urd watched Akane take yet another spill onto the grass, the youngest Tendo’s feet knocked out from under her by a single sweep of her sensei’s foot. The nineteen year old girl tucked into a roll as she went down, and fought to spin to face her short, muscular, bald tormentor circling about her as she came out of the roll on her feet, only to stumble and fight to keep standing as she staggered to the side for step after step, arms and bokken flailing for balance.

Her sensei didn’t give her a chance to recover, stepping forward and casually kicking her in the chest, then following her down to land across her abdomen, a hand pinning the hand she held the bokken in to the ground as he laid his own bokken across her throat. “I would say you have a problem, little one,” he chuckled.

She stared at him for a moment, a glare on her pasty, sweat-streaked face, then grudgingly agreed between gasps for breath. “I yield.”

His chuckle turning into a bark of laughter, he rose to his feet and offered his student a hand. “Good of you, not that it was necessary,” he said as he pulled her to her feet and took the bokken from her quivering hand. “You were well and truly screwed, and we’re training for real combat, not tournament play. But enough kenjutsu for the day, time to practice your ofudas.”

Akane nodded jerkily and turned toward the shrine’s living quarters, only to stagger, her sensei catching her arm to hold her up.

Urd floated free of the branch she’d been sitting on, a slight frown on her face as she carefully maintained her obfuscation spell. She slipped into the quarters behind the pair, cursing her lack of practice since moving into the temple with her younger sisters and Keiichi — not much use for a spell to turn away mortal eyes when living with one.

Inside, the sensei led his pupil to the family room of the living quarters and helped her kneel before a low table before stepping over to a cabinet to pull out a stack of blank parchments, a brush, and a small metal tin. Placing them before the still gasping Tendo, he said, “Now, let’s see how well your studies have stuck — the complete series to date, in reverse order.”

“Of course, sensei,” Akane replied, reaching out a still shaking hand to pick up and carefully open the metal tin. Picking up the brush beside the sheets, she pulled a parchment from the top of the stack, dipped the brush in the ink inside the tin and slowly started to write a string of kanji and symbols down the sheet only to have the writing spattered by ink drops from the quivering brush. Putting down the brush, the raven-haired girl lifted her hands and glared at them. When the shaking had decreased to a barely perceptible tremor, she again picked up the brush, dipped it in the ink, and started over.

Shifting around so that she could see what Akane was writing, the goddess’s frown deepened along with her confusion — the ofuda the Tendo was creating, done right, would _definitely_ ruin the day of a low-level demon. Maybe even make things difficult for a mid-level. And in spite of the need to take things slow because of her exhaustion and shaky hands, Akane was doing it right.

But the Akane that was pushing through her near collapse level of exhaustion to kick out intricate calligraphy to give demons fits was _not_ the same girl that Urd had encountered when she’d read through Ranma’s file.

Urd had actually enjoyed reading that file, at first — the chaos and excitement surrounding Ranma had struck a chord ... until she reached the marriage that should have been the happy ending and instead had been a complete fiasco. And then the final scene that had had her fighting not to lose Belldandy’s excellent breakfast, especially when she read which demon Genma had bargained with. Then she finally noticed the time-stamp, and promptly lost her fight and the meal. A _year_ Ranma had hung on that wall, before Hild finally turned her loose like a coursing hound. And Akane had helped put “her” there.

_That_ girl had been caring and abusive in turns, always ready to assume the worst so long as it was Ranma she was doing the assuming about, outwardly confident in her skills as a martial artist and inwardly probably jealous of her fiancé’s accomplishments. She hadn’t been the worst offender in that file, but, between the abuse and the part she’d played in Ranma’s death, she had earned her place on Raven’s little list.

But _this_ girl ...

“Good, Akane-chan, _very_ good,” the sensei — no, the _Shinto priest_ said, looking through the teenager’s efforts. “Driven to the point of collapse, and every one of these would be at least useable and some of them powerful. You should have no trouble creating more so long as you’re awake, so we’ll switch to creating them under adverse environmental conditions — rock, sand, forest, grasslands, wind and rain when the weather cooperates. So, let’s move on to recognition.”

He shuffled the newly-created ofuda into a stack and set them to the side, then rose to fetch another stack from the cabinet. Kneeling across from his student, he set the new stack in front of him and turned over the first sheet to reveal an image that Urd instantly recognized — a figure that would look equally at home in a ball gown or a business suit, slender, young ... and with tattoos of a diamond between her eyes and two slashes on each cheek.

“Amaki,” Akane promptly said. “A demoness 3rd class, limited, specializes in seduction and blackmail, no preference for either sex. The ofuda that can deal with her are too many to quickly list, but I’m unlikely to get the chance to use any of them as she can run faster than I can.”

“Correct.” The next image revealed a _very_ familiar image — Urd’s white-haired mother, a puckish smile on Hild’s seemingly innocent face.

“Hild, Queen of Hell. If she shows up I’m done: nothing I’ll have will do more than irritate her, I can’t run fast enough to escape her, and an appeal to higher powers is not likely to work within her own domain.”

Urd missed the next image as she stared in stunned amazement at the girl she’d been prepared to despise. _She’s planning an assault on Niflheim, she’s planning to go after Ranma!_ Urd thought. _Not that she’s going to need to, with Ranma — Raven — coming after her._

_But this makes no sense, what am_ I _doing here? I thought Father was just putting me through another ‘teaching moment’, but if Akane’s actually repented, if she’s doing what she can to fix what she did, if an Intervention is needed to save Akane’s life when Raven finds her, it should be a valkyrie here, not a system administrator — get the valkyrie/fury relationship off on the right foot, and all that. So why didn’t Lind get this assignment, instead of me?_

A clatter startled the platinum blonde goddess 2nd class, jerking her from her circling ruminations. She looked up to find Akane on her feet ... barely, a miko helping her stay up on feet now covered in ink from the spilled tin. Akane was stammering an apology while the miko was assuring her that it no problem, but the priest’s head whipped around to stare at Urd. Belatedly, the Norn of the Past realized her obfuscation spell had weakened while she was distracted and hastily focused to bring it back to full strength. Had he actually seen her, or just sensed something ... ?

But after a long moment, the priest simply nodded respectfully to her, then strode over to sweep his student up in his arms. “Relax, Akane-chan, no harm done. But let’s get you down to the furo without tracking ink all through the temple. A good massage and a long soak, and then I’ll give you your night’s homework. Miyoko-chan, if you could go ahead and get the doors?”

The miko hurried ahead, followed by the priest with Akane, and a still-confused goddess bringing up the rear, not even smiling at the somewhat ludicrous scene of Akane being carried in the arms of the smaller man.

/oOo\

Skuld frowned. With her two sisters on assignment, Peorth filling a shift at the Earth Help Center, and Keiichi off at his job, this was the perfect time for some delicate work on Banpei’s latest upgrade. Unfortunately, the circumstances leading to the empty temple were conspiring to distract her.

She _tried_ to get it right this time, really she did, but in spite of her best efforts the bare wires crossed just as they were about to slip into the two tiny holes in the new rocket launcher she was building for her guardian robot, Banpei. A shower of sparks shot out from the crossed wires, and the childlike goddess leaped back as two rockets roared out from their launchers and slammed into the ceiling, exploding in a gentle shower of sparkling confetti.

Diving for the doorway, she rolled out into the hall to slam into the opposite wall as the confetti drifted down to coat the floor, shining like so many nighttime stars. Sitting up and rubbing her head, she stared at the mess in her room and fought to keep from saying any of those words that goddesses just weren’t supposed to use, however old they got, as she contemplated the long hours of excruciatingly precise cleanup that lay before her. On the other hand, that rant would feel _so_ good, and neither of her sisters was home....

“Skuld! There you are.”

The youngest of the Norns looked up to see her middle sister walking briskly toward her, Lind beside her — though the lips of the famously stoic valkyrie were twitching suspiciously. But Skuld’s nascent anger vanished, jaw dropping, as a wave of joyful hilarity washed over her from the tiny point of light her sister’s hands were cupped beneath, centered between her breasts. “Belldandy, what’s that?!” she gasped out.

“It’s half a soul,” the Norn of the Present replied, smiling fondly down at the friendly star.

“ _Half_ a soul? But that’s not possible, a soul is an infinite object — split it, and you have two infinite objects.”

For a moment, Belldandy’s smile faltered. “You’re normally right, but there are some circumstances where the usual rules don’t apply. Now come along, we need your help to find this little one a new home.”

“ _My_ help? But I don’t know anything about assigning reincarnations yet! How can I help?” Skuld protested.

“You don’t need to, this task is intrinsic to our natures,” Belldandy assured her younger sister.

The two newcomers had walked up to the sitting child, and Lind glanced into Skuld’s room and froze. “Skuld, is that ... that ... ?”

“Okay! Let’s go, can’t keep the baby waiting!” Skuld enthused, leaping to her feet and grabbing the other two goddesses’ hands to pull them down the corridor. “Uh ... where are we going?”

Lind glanced over Skuld’s head at Belldandy, her lips pressing into a firm line to keep from laughing out loud at the older sister’s rueful smile.

“Let Lind take the lead, Skuld, she knows where we’re going,” Belldandy said with a sigh.

“Oh, right.”


	11. And One Piece Off the Board

Raven sat on the red brick steps to the entrance of the three-story apartment building, gently rocking the once again sleeping baby, the raven Thought perched in a nearby tree. Just as she had expected, it had been easy enough to find — she hadn’t even had to threaten any of the shopkeepers that Kasumi usually patronized, simply checking out a phone book did it. But now that she was there, for the first time since Hild had taken her down from Rothgan’s trophy wall and made her the offer, she didn’t know what to _do_.

The redhead sighed at the thought. _No, ya know what ta do,_ she told herself. _It’s simple enough — ya kill Akane and get yer new job as a Fury, so ya don’t hafta go back up on Rothgan’s wall. Ya just don’t know if ya_ should _do it._

It had seemed so obvious that Akane’s name belonged on her target list when Hild had asked. After all, it had been her refusal to back off and let her fiancé handle things, her attack in the middle of a lethal fight that had set Ranma up for Mousse’s knives in the chest. After years together, she _still_ —

Raven’s eyes were clenched shut, remembering the last living sight she’d had of her fiancée’s face, Akane’s features twisted by fury, eyes hot with anger — the way Akane had charged forward, tried to stop Rothgan from hauling her spirit off to Hell. _You know it’s true, Yuka — I don’t know what Nabiki said to her after her suicide attempt, but you_ know _how she’ll feel about it! If the price of getting Ranma out of hell is her life, she’ll be happy to pay it._ Sayuri’s pain-filled words came back to her, and the redhead shook her head. _Fine._ Let _her die, if she cares so much now!_

As if picking up her minder’s dark thoughts, the baby in her arms awoke and started to fuss, drawing all of Raven’s attention, her head bent down, cooing to the little one the same way Yuka had. She soon had her bundle gurgling up at her happily.

“Oh, my!”

Raven’s head shot up at the familiar voice, the happy grin vanishing from her face at the sight of the eldest Tendo sister — the eldest Tendo, now that her father was dead. The young woman was standing a few yards away, one hand up over her mouth, the other holding a bag of groceries in a slackening grip. Like a shot, Raven was up from the step and caught the bag just as it dropped toward the pavement.

Kasumi barely noticed, her eyes fixed on the redhead that had so brutally died while the woman that could have restrained her youngest sister had been away from the house enjoying a movie. Against her will her gaze shifted to the familiar katana hilt showing over the revenant’s shoulder. “Are ... are you here for Akane?” she asked in a shaky voice.

Raven nodded without speaking, face grim.

“I see.” Then the baby started fussing, Kasumi’s eyes dropped at the sound, and she found herself falling victim to a giggle fit: here she was looking at a grim Avenger back from the dead, sword hilt showing over her shoulder — with a bag of baby supplies hanging from the other shoulder, a cranky baby complaining in the crook of one arm and a bag of groceries in the other, a panicky expression on her face.

_It’s getting close to time for Akane to come home._ In an instant, the giggles stopped. Sighing, Kasumi relieved the redhead of the baby, cooing to the bundle. The bundle instantly quieted, and Kasumi giggled again as Raven rolled her eyes in disgust. The long earth-haired girl stepped past the redhead to unlock the door into the apartment building. “Come on in,” she invited resignedly.

/\

“Tadaima!” Kasumi called out as she led Raven into the apartment, baby still in her arms and Thought on her shoulder. Raven glanced around as she slipped off her outside shoes, then followed Kasumi out of the small hallway to find herself in a combination kitchen/dining room. She walked over to put the bag of groceries on the counter of the kitchen area while Thought fluttered over to perch on the back of one of the chairs around the table.

Kasumi, you’re back!” Nabiki called back. “I got a call from Sayuri, Ranma visited the school, he’s on his way here,” she continued as she stepped into the room from a door beside the kitchen area. “What should I tell Akane — ?” She broke off, gaping at the sight of the redhead right next to her, turning away from the kitchen counter.

“Yeah, I should’a figured she’d call,” the revenant said, then turned, face hardening as Nodoka stepped out of another door across the room and froze at the sight of her child. “Saotome-san,” Raven greeted her, voice leeched of all emotion. She looked her mother over, eyes widening slightly. In the light of day, upright rather than curled up on a bed, Nodoka’s pregnant state was obvious — and advanced, at least six months along. “Ya sure didn’t wait long before tryin’ fer a replacement,” Raven said, voice shaking slightly.

“Ranma —” Nodoka managed to get out, only to break off as the redhead turned back to the Tendo sisters, pointedly ignoring her.

Kasumi glanced sympathetically toward the older woman, then down at the baby in her arms as it started fussing again. “I think somebody’s hungry,” she suggested.

“Oh, right.” Raven swung the baby bag from her shoulder to the table, pulled out the baby formula and bottle, then paused, unsure of what to do next.

With a sigh, Kasumi handed the baby back to the redhead and grabbed the supplies. A few minutes later she had the bottle ready, and took the now crying baby back from a desperate Raven. A moment later the cries stopped as the baby happily sucked at the bottle’s nipple. “So, Ranma, is it a boy or a girl? What’s its name? Where did you pick it up?” Kasumi asked, smiling down at her armful.

“Don’t call me that,” Raven replied coldly, face hardening. “Since Genma and Nodoka decided ta just throw me away, they — she can keep the name, too. Call me Raven.” Ignoring Nodoka’s gasp, she continued, “I don’t know what her name is, I didn’t ask Mousse an’ Shampoo before I killed them.”

The others stared in shock at the redhead. Finally, Nabiki asked, “So, what are you going to do with your victory spoils?”

“I ...” Raven, paused, face softening into confusion. “I don’t know. I was gonna ask Ukyo to raise her, but ...” She shrugged as the others flinched. “I’ll think a’ somethin’.”

Kasumi’s mind raced. She owed Raven for the way she’d failed him, and maybe if she offered, when Akane got home ... “I’ll do it.” she asserted. Then glanced around and smiled for a moment in the stunned silence.

“But, Kasumi, I ... Akane ...” Raven managed to get out.

Kasumi sighed, eyes, dropping to the little one in her arms. “Raven ... Ranma, what-t-t-ev-v-v-ver ...” Breaking off to fight for control, she continued after a moment, “Whatever happens between you and Akane, I owe you.”

“But, ya didn’t do any —”

“That’s right,” the eldest Tendo interrupted. “When Akane was jumping to conclusions and taking out her frustrations on you, when Nabiki was selling candid photos of your girl side to perverts,” — beside her, Nabiki flinched — “when the fathers were hatching bizarre plans to marry the two of you, I did nothing. I’d like to try and make it up a little. Besides, it doesn’t sound like you have a better idea.”

Raven stared at her, thinking furiously, but finally shrugged. “You’re right, I don’t,” she admitted. “But can ya afford her? Don’t babies cost money?”

“We will manage, won’t we, Nabiki?” Kasumi asked her sister, voice once again serene.

Nabiki’s gaze switched back and forth between her older sister and the revenant, before falling to the baby in her sister’s arms.  Her mind flashed back over the “harmless” pictures she’d sold, the auction when Ranma had briefly been her fiancé, the blowout at the wedding ... and an Akane covered in Ranma’s blood kneeling on the ground, holding her fiancé’s flame-haired decapitated head in her arms like Kasumi was holding the baby now; and the night when the blood spattered about the dojo’s kitchen had been Akane’s, when she’d tried to kill herself with one of Kasumi’s kitchen knives — thank all the kami she’d chosen one that needed sharpening, and had tried to cut across the wrist instead of lengthwise. Nabiki’s ears echoed with the memory of Akane’s throat-ripping shriek of pain when the demon had faded out of sight with his translucent, naked, redheaded prize.

“S-Sure thing, Kas-s-sumi, the rugrat won’t lack for anyth-thing, I’ll s-see t-t-to it,” she finally managed to stammer out.

“Good, I knew I could count on you,” Kasumi approved, giving her sister a sad smile. Then taking a deep breath, she said, “Raven, it will be little while before Akane gets home, so you might as well relax. The family room is in here.” She picked up the bag of baby supplies from the table and walked toward the door Nodoka had stepped out of.


	12. Hymn of Breaking Strain

Raven shifted uncomfortably where she sat in the Tendo apartment’s small family room. It wasn’t that the couch was uncomfortable, it wasn’t — the sisters (Nabiki, probably) had found a decent place when they’d been forced to sell the family compound. But each of the room’s occupants — Kasumi and her new baby sharing the couch with Raven, Nabiki on the other side of Kasumi, Nodoka in an easy chair next to Raven — was in her own world, no one even considering turning on the television Thought was perched on across the room against the wall beside the open sliding door leading to a bedroom. The silence was getting downright oppressive.

Finally, the revenant couldn’t take it any longer. Besides, there were things she wanted to know. “So, what happened after I was murdered?” she asked, voice harsh.

Beside her, Kasumi paused in gently rocking the sleepy baby, while Nabiki stiffened in her armchair to the side. The two exchanged glances with each other and Nodoka in her own armchair.

Finally, Kasumi sighed. “The police ruled it an accidental death during a sparring session with real weapons,” she started, “and Akane didn’t take it well. She ... she ...”

“She did what she’d always done,” Nabiki said in a harsh voice, taking over when Kasumi paused in a search for the right words. “She blamed everyone _but_ her for what happened.

“Ukyo rushed over as soon as she heard about it and we lied through our teeth about the details, just as we did with the police. Akane was still in shock so she didn’t say anything to contradict us, so when we put all the blame on Ryoga and the Amazons, Ukyo bought it. The Amazons were gone before the police ruling — they were gone the next morning, in fact — but that still left Ryoga around, sort of.

“The next time Pig Boy showed up at the dojo, Akane called Ukyo, and the two ambushed him. You can imagine how _that_ worked out.” Nabiki grimaced. “All brute force and no imagination — I told them about his curse, all they needed were a few water balloons, but instead they had to make it a stand-up fight.

“So once they got their asses kicked, I decided to do it right — I called Akari and told her how you died. She rushed straight into town to talk to us personally. I don’t know what she said to Ryoga later, if anything, but she wasn’t very happy with him when she left.”

“Yeah, she talked to him, told him she didn’t want ta see him again,” Raven interjected. “He blamed me for it when we met, a’ course.  And you’re right about the water balloons, used ‘em myself.”

The room went still, Nodoka and the Tendos again exchanging uneasy glances. “Anyway,” Nabiki finally continued, “Akari said something to Akane before she left. I don’t know what, but it shook her. Ukyo’s suicide shook her even more. And then ...” She took a deep breath, fighting to keep her voice even. “Then, father got drunk and walked in front of a truck, and she broke — went from saying none of it was her fault to saying it was _all_ her fault. She quit going to school, hardly ever left her room, refused to talk to anybody, spent most of her time staring at the wall, had to be told to clean up occasionally ... finally, the night before we had to move out of the dojo she grabbed one of Kasumi’s knives and tried t-t-to cut her wrists.”

She broke off her tale, turning her head to stare at the nearby tree visible through the glass door leading to the balcony as she fought for control, memories of Akane screaming at her, blood splashing her, the walls and cupboards as her younger sister tossed her around like a ragdoll, fighting to keep an increasingly slippery grip on her younger sister’s wrists, keep her from using the knife more than she already had, until Akane finally went limp, unconscious from loss of blood....

Finally drawing a shuddering breath, Nabiki continued, “I made sure I was by her bed in the hospital when she woke up, and asked her if she was a coward as well as a spoiled brat — you were stuck in hell, it was _partly_ her fault, and her response was to try to kill herself instead of rescuing you. She eventually agreed with me, so while she recovered I found a sensei to train her, Hino-sensei, the priest of the Hikawa Shrine. Since then, every waking minute that her sensei hasn’t insisted she take off to relax has been spent studying and training, getting ready to go after you.”

She turned to face Raven, the revenant shocked at the sight of two slow tears slowly sliding down the cheeks of an otherwise coldly expressionless face. “And now, here you are. I don’t want to know what kind of hell you’ve been living through, but don’t think that Akane hasn’t been living in her own outpost.”

Raven stared at her, shaken to the core by the Ice Queen's naked pain, searching for something — anything — to say, only to twitch at the sound of someone opening the front door of the apartment. “Tadaima!” they heard a weary-sounding Akane call out from the dining room.

For a moment, the family room’s occupants all sat in frozen silence, until Nabiki sighed and slumped in her seat. “We’re in here!” she called out in a dull voice.

/\

Perched in the tree outside the Tendo apartment, the Daimakaicho of Niflheim was feeling increasingly desperate as she listened to the conversation taking place inside. The fact that they were talking at all was bad enough — the last thing a vengeance-driven spirit needed was to _talk_ to his targets, or anyone connected to them other than to ask for directions — but the story Nabiki had started telling was even worse. _Damn it, why couldn’t Raven have simply returned to Niflheim when she learned Ukyo was dead?_ It might have been stretching things a bit, but Hild would have been happy to rule that Raven’s request to be sent to Uc-chan’s meant the trip wasn’t part of her test and send her to a spot just outside the Hikawa Shrine. And ...

Hild glanced around. She was sensing someone — someone both demonic and divine, and there was only one person that fit that category that was likely to be here — and there was Akane, trudging down the street toward the corner entrance to the apartment building, the katana whose hilt showed over her shoulder radiating its own enchantments ... including an obfuscation charm. But most of Hild’s attention was on the youngest Tendo’s companion, and her heart turned over at the sight of her daughter floating along above the youngest Tendo. _Wonderful, just what I needed to top off this fiasco, some vituperation from Urd while I send Raven back to Rothgan’s wall...._ Though if Kami-sama had assigned their daughter to this case, she’d know what would happen to Raven if she failed her vengeance quest. Just how would she take the redheaded revenant’s failure? Hild felt a flicker of hope at the thought — maybe she’d actually get _something_ out of this total fubar.

Doing her best to suppress the flicker — it wouldn’t be the first time she’d hoped to at least start to mend things with her daughter, and every time before those hopes had been dashed — Hild dropped her obfuscation shield slightly, just enough to get Urd’s attention without revealing herself to Akane.

Urd jerked and hastily looked around as she sensed her mother’s presence, catching the movement when Hild waved to her. Urd’s eyes widened, and as Akane entered the apartment building the platinum blonde half-goddess floated up to join her mother. “What are you doing here, Hild?” she growled.

“What, no happy greeting for your mother? How disrespectful!” Urd chided, a menacing undertone beneath her lighthearted rebuke, then shrugged. “I’m here for the same reason I imagine you are, to watch the rise of my latest Fury.”

Urd opened her mouth, a hot retort on the tip of her tongue, when a joyful shout yanked their attention back to the view through the balcony door to the Tendo family room.

/\

Akane trudged down the street toward home (her _new_ home, not the one she’d grown up in, that she’d helped throw away along with the fiancé and father she’d helped kill). Even with the hot soak and massage after her training, she was going to be _very_ happy to get off her feet. The katana on her back that Hino-sensei insisted she carry except when asleep or in the shower (and then close to hand) was protected from the notice of everyone around her by obfuscation charms, but it was as solid as ever — and didn’t work well with seats on trains and buses, especially when crowded. As a result, she’d been on her feet for the entire ride back. The cross body sling bag full of books her sensei had loaned her slung over one shoulder didn’t help, either.

_Stop whining, Akane,_ she thought as she unlocked the front door to the apartment building, and headed for the stairwell for the trudge to the third floor (the lack of an elevator was a major reason for the low rent). _You’ll have plenty of time to sit once you get home, while you study those books._ She wasn’t looking forward to puzzling out the texts at all, but it was doing wonders for her reading comprehension in kanji and katakana.

As she climbed the stairs, for a moment her thoughts turned to her sensei. Hino-sensei played the simple priest (if somewhat perverted, with any pretty young woman but her), but with the skill set he had he _had_ to have led an exciting life when he was younger, and she resolved again to try to get him to tell her about it — it might actually help when she left on her own mission. _Yeah, right, like you believe_ that _!_ she thought, unlocking the apartment's front door.

“Tadaima!” she called as she stepped into the apartment, pausing to slip off her shoes and step into a pair of house slippers. She frowned — there hadn’t been an immediate response, and one of her sisters should be home. And Nodoka had been visiting when she left in the morning, so she should still be here, it seemed like she’d been spending more time in the sisters’ apartment than her rebuilt home with her bastard of a husband. Of course, that descriptive might explain it, Akane was surprised that woman hadn’t hinted that she simply move in. With Kasumi insisting she and Akane share a bed, there was an extra bedroom.

“We’re in here!” Akane heard Nabiki call from the family room as she swung her sling bag off her shoulder and placed it on the dining room table. She felt a flicker of concern — her sister sounded ... tired, drained. Akane had been so focused on her training and studies, she had trouble remembering any particular moment separated from the general haze of daily life since she’d arrived home from her first training session with Hino-sensei. Kasumi had insisted they eat out during her mandatory rest days, and there had been a movie they had dragged her to....

Akane walked over to open doorway to the family room and stepped through. “Hey, sis, why don’t we go see a movie this week —”

She slammed to a stop at the sight of the cute, overendowed redhead rising from the couch. “Ranma?” she whispered. “RANMA!” And she was charging forward, grabbing the smaller girl, whirling them around in what little room there was in the middle of the room, laughing as tears rolled down her cheeks.

But after a bit she realized that other than her laughter, the room was deathly quiet, the girl in her arms stiff, her return embrace hesitant. Akane ceased spinning them around and stepped back to arm’s length, her hands on Ranma’s shoulders.

Now that she’d calmed down, new senses she’d acquired under the lash of Hino-sensei’s training could make themselves heard, and what they were saying was disquieting: the girl before her was _dead_. Not only was she not breathing, but there wasn’t a trace of ki. Instead, what the youngest Tendo was holding was a supernatural entity of real power — spirit given substance. An embodied spirit unable to look her in the eye.

A whisper of motion caught her attention, and Akane looked up over the other girl’s shoulder to find a raven watching her from its perch on top of the television. The youngest Tendo’s breath caught at the sight — the raven was not just a power, but a Power! “Ranma, what raven is that?” she asked quietly.

The redhead sighed and finally lifted her gaze to look up into Akane’s eyes. “Don’t call me Ranma, my name’s Raven now,” she said equally quietly. “I dunno what he is, but his name’s Thought.”

Akane sucked in a breath at the name, shocked to her core. Closing her eyes, she slowly breathed out, seeking calm before focusing again on the other girl’s face. “Ran — Raven, you didn’t escape somehow from Rothgan’s Wall, did you?”

Raven shrugged Akane’s hands off her shoulders and turned away, shaking her head. “No, I didn’t. Hild-sama came an’ took me down, made me an offer.”

“What kind of offer?”

Raven hesitated for a moment. “Ta become one a’ her Furies,” she finally replied with another shrug.

_A Fury ... !_ Akane quickly reviewed what she'd learned about the Furies, and blanched. “And I’m on the list for your test, aren’t I?”

Raven nodded jerkily. “Yeah, ya are.”

“Good, I belong on it,” Akane said bitterly, feeling Raven stiffen as she stepped up to wrap her arms around the redhead from behind. Over Raven’s shoulder, her gaze swept the other women in the room: Nodoka sitting stiffly in the deep armchair she normally hated thanks to her advancing pregnancy, tears streaming down her cheeks; Nabiki stonefaced where she slumped back in the couch, one arm over Kasumi’s shaking shoulders. The oldest sister was trying not to break down into sobs, her arms clutching a ... baby? _Where did_ that _come from? Later, if ever, not important right now._ “I was going to probably get myself killed trying to get you out of there when I was as ready as I could be,” she continued, “so this just makes things easier all around. There’s a park nearby where we can take care of it. Can I take the time to write a letter for Sayuri and Yuka, first? I owe them a decent farewell after the way I’ve mostly ignored them the past year.”

For long moments Raven simply stood frozen in place, until her shoulders abruptly slumped. Sighing, she twisted in her former fiancée’s arms to pull her into a mutual embrace, a real one this time, and Akane luxuriated in the feel of the arms about her pressing her against the spirit’s still-overly abundant chest. Finally, Raven broke the hug to hold Akane out at arm’s length, gaze fixed on the taller girl’s face as if she was memorizing every line. She shook her head. “Naw, don’t worry ‘bout it, I’m not gonna kill ya.”

Akane stared in shock at Raven’s calm face, and suddenly she was in front of the open door to the dining room, katana steady in her hands. “No! You are _not_ going back up on that wall, you’re not!” she snarled.

“I d-d-don’t think it’ll come ta that,” Raven said, smiling tremulously. “I’ll just hafta ask Hild-sama if she has any other jobs she’d like me ta take, she’s bound ta have somethin’ fer someone as good as I am.”

“Right, like she did this past year, while you were hanging on Rothgan’s Wall, waiting for the next time he felt like raping you?” She ignored the cries and sucked in breath of the other women, eyes locked on the revenant. “Not a chance. No, you have an easy way to avoid that, and you’re taking it!”

Raven glanced around at the shocked expressions of Nabiki, Kasumi, and her ... and Nodoka. “I take it ya never told them the details a’ what was happenin’ ta me,” she said, then looked back at Akane with a familiar cocky grin that made the raven-haired girl’s heart turn over. “And ya think ya can stop me from just walkin’ out? Not a chance, even if I didn’t just take the balcony ... and there are guys down in Hell that can handle me like a baby, ya wouldn’t have a chance. Give it up, Akane, please,” she finished, voice going soft. “I’ll think a’ somethin’, just have yerself a good life, and I’ll show up on yer doorstep someday.”

“No, I won’t!” Akane insisted, even as her thoughts raced. Ran — Raven was right, damn — curse it. Thanks to the months of hard training she was bound to be better than Raven expected, but — “Raven, I challenge you!”

“What?” Raven asked in confusion.

“I challenge you. If I win, you kill me. If you win, I’ll give up any attempt to rescue you. Oh, and the duel is with these,” she added, waggling her katana. “Ranma never refused a challenge, does Raven?”

Raven stared at her, confusion replaced by a thoughtful look as she considered the offer. Akane kept her gaze fixed on the redhead, trying to ignore the bitter hope dawning on the faces of Nabiki and Kasumi watching from the couch.

“All right, you’re on,” Raven finally said, and Akane relaxed and straightened as she lifted her katana over her shoulder to slide it down into its sheath. “Good!” she said with a happy smile. “Just let me get that letter written, and we can take it to the park.” _And I can show you just how good I’ve gotten, over these past months — probably not as good as you, but good enough for a creative ‘mistake’. I’m sorry, Nabiki, Kasumi, but I can’t let this work out as you want, not with the price Ran — Raven would have to pay for it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title comes from the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling.
> 
> The careful text-books measure  
>  (Let all who build beware!)  
> The load, the shock, the pressure  
>  Material can bear.  
> So when the buckled girder  
>  Lets down the grinding span,  
> The blame of loss, or murder,  
>  Is laid upon the man.  
>  Not on the Stuff—the Man!
> 
> But in our daily dealing  
>  With stone and steel, we find  
> The Gods have no such feeling  
>  Of justice toward mankind.  
> To no set gauge they make us,—  
>  For no laid course prepare—  
> And presently o’ertake us  
>  With loads we cannot bear.  
>  Too merciless to bear.
> 
> The prudent text-books give it  
>  In tables at the end—  
> The stress that shears a rivet  
>  Or makes a tie-bar bend—  
> What traffic wrecks macadam—  
>  What concrete should endure—  
> But we, poor Sons of Adam,  
>  Have no such literature,  
>  To warn us or make sure!
> 
> We hold all Earth to plunder—  
>  All Time and Space as well—  
> Too wonder-stale to wonder  
>  At each new miracle;  
> Till, in the mid-illusion  
>  Of Godhead ‘neath our hand,  
> Falls multiple confusion  
>  On all we did or planned.  
>  The mighty works we planned.
> 
> We only of Creation  
>  (Oh, how luckier the bridge and rail!)  
> Abide the twin-damnation—  
>  To fail and know we fail.  
> Yet we—by which sole token  
>  We know we once were Gods—  
> Take shame in being broken  
>  However great the odds—  
>  The Burden or the Odds.
> 
> Oh, veiled and secret Power  
>  Whose paths we seek in vain,  
> Be with us in our hour  
>  Of overthrow and pain;  
> That we—by which sure token  
>  We know Thy ways are true—  
> In spite of being broken,  
>  Because of being broken,  
>  May rise and build anew.  
>  Stand up and build anew!


	13. The Friend Across the Field

In a quiet corner of a park close to the Tendo apartment, sitting in a tree overlooking Akane and Raven as they took their positions across from each other, a Hild firmly invisible to mortal eyes didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Actually, that wasn’t true, she knew exactly what to do — maintain her whimsically sardonic, faintly malicious smile as her fuming daughter took a similar seat several branches over. What Hild didn’t know was which she _wanted_ to do. In life Ranma had proven himself to be the quintessential chaos magnet, renowned for the bizarre situations he found himself in, and in death Raven was proving no different.

_Though this situation is proving more serious than most,_ the Daimakaicho of Niflheim thought as she watched the two opponents bow to each other and take up defensive stances, katanas sloped toward each other in their two-handed grips. It was obvious, to her at least, what Akane hoped to accomplish, and Hild silently saluted her for it. Whatever happened to her, the raven-haired girl’s destination was not in doubt — unlike the others on Raven’s little list, Hild had no doubt that she wouldn’t be seeing _her_ arriving in her realm for at least another lifetime. Nor would the two Tendo sisters watching from a score of yards away, for that matter, Nabiki with one arm around her older sister and Kasumi clutching her new baby. The middle Tendo would have been a real possibility, driven by both her previous greedy cynicism and newfound bitterness at how badly things were turning out. But with a sister to support and a new daughter to both support and help raise — no, she’d been firmly turned away from her previous self-destructive and probably short road to Hell.

Hild glanced again over toward her daughter, the mother’s emotions tilting toward appalled amusement — now, there was someone else confused by how things had turned out. Everything had seemed clear enough, other than the question of why a systems administrator had been assigned to field work (Urd hadn’t said, but Hild suspected her former husband was up to something — one thing that hadn’t changed over the millennia was that he liked his little games). All Urd had had to do was watch over Akane, and intervene in the likely event that Raven was going to be able to kill her. That would typically be an assignment for a Valkyrie, but Urd had more than enough power and experience to deal with a simple revenant — or, since this had been Ranma, to keep the revenant away from Akane until reinforcements could arrive. But now, with Raven fighting to _keep_ Akane from getting killed, the entire purpose of Urd’s presence had been turned on its head and the demon/goddess hybrid was obviously trying to figure out what to do now.

Then a clash of steel on steel yanked Hild’s attention back to revenant and mortal, as Raven initiated the first strike.

/\

Raven stepped back from her bow to Akane, falling naturally into the defensive stance he had learned years before, from the cursory training his father had insisted on. Of course, when it came to martial arts — or any other physical training — ‘cursory’ for Ranma had meant something very different than everyone else....

Even as the Saotome family blade came up, Raven’s eyes found Akane’s, seeking the passionate fury her former fiancée had always brought to her fights, both her strength and her weakness ... and found nothing but calm, confident determination. The angry girl Ranma had known was nowhere to be found. _Why couldn’t she have been like this when I — !_ Raven cut the thought off. It was pointless, and a distraction. What mattered was that, here and now, there would be no winner in the contest of wills that often preceded duels, because Akane was refusing to engage. She simply waited through a long minute for Raven to open the dance.

_Okay, let’s get this over with._ The redhead flowed forward, determined to end the fight in one overpowering rush ... and almost lost right then and there as Akane’s own blade engaged Raven’s, the Tendo _twisted_ , and almost ripped the Saotome blade from Raven’s grasp. Raven held on to her katana, but at the price of finding the blade badly out of position. A desperate leap back left one sleeve fluttering in the light breeze, slit open from wrist to elbow.

_Whoa, she_ has _been trainin’! This’s gonna be harder than I thought._ Raven finally really _looked_ at her opponent, and was impressed by what she saw. Akane had been good with a katana before — not in Ranma’s league, but good — and from the smooth way she moved as she came back on guard, her perfectly relaxed stance, the quiet assurance she radiated, it was obvious Nabiki hadn’t been exaggerating about what Akane had been doing for much of the time Ranma had spent hanging on Rothgan’s wall.

For another long minute the two stared at each other. Suddenly, Akane softly smiled — the same smile that had always made Ranma’s heart turn over in his (or her) chest — and her katana twitched, the point falling slightly off position, beckoning. Raven found herself smiling back even as she accepted the invitation. Once again she flowed confidently forward into the attack, if much more carefully, and Akane backed up, steel ringing on steel again and again as she parried a barrage of strikes.

/\

As she watched Akane step back again and again under her former fiancé’s constant push, Urd shifted uncomfortably on her branch and once again wondered what she was doing there. Normally, she’d have been much closer, hovering invisibly over the fight and ready to intervene the instant it appeared that Raven was about to successfully kill an innocent victim. No, that wasn’t quite right — normally _Lind_ or another of her fellow Valkyries would be doing the hovering, and Urd would read a report on the outcome on her monitor. She was a systems administrator, for heaven’s sake! She was supposed to be keeping Yggdrasil running smoothly and watching for possible kinks in reality, not watching a revenant duel with her chosen victim. _At least you can’t say Raven’s_ playing _with Akane,_ the platinum-haired hybrid thought despairingly. Raven had to be the _oddest_ revenant and Fury candidate she’d ever heard of, and Urd wondered what Lind would make of a Fury candidate fighting to _keep_ her presumed prey from being killed. _Mother must be loving this._

She glanced over at her tanned, platinum-haired mother sitting on a nearby branch and leaning back against the tree trunk, uncaring what the rough bark might be doing to the luxurious (and barely there) miniskirt and single-button jacket she was wearing, the raven-shaped Power that was Thought perched next to her. Hild’s attention was focused on the fight below. Feeling her gaze, the Daimakaicho lifted her eyes to meet her daughter’s, and the whimsical, dark-edged smile that she usually showed to the world broadened slightly before she sighed dramatically. “Don’t worry, dearest, it looks like you’ll be able to return to your sisters soon enough — Raven’s figured out that humans just can’t match a spirit’s endurance. It seems I won’t be gaining a new Fury, after all. How ... disappointing.”

Urd opened her mouth for her typical scathing rebuke, but paused. Something about what her mother had just said didn’t ring true. No, not what she had said, but how she had said it — there was actually a hint of sorrow in her tone, regret in her face, that Urd had never seen before. What ... ?

Hild’s eyebrow rose and she giggled slightly at the sight of her daughter sitting there with her mouth open, then turned her gaze back toward the circling fighters below only to pause, eyes almost imperceptibly widening in a look that screamed shock (for the Daimakaicho, at least).

Urd followed her mother’s gaze and froze at the sight of three new goddesses, under their own glamour: Lind, and the other two Norns. But what were they doing _here_? Belldandy had her own assignment ... why was she holding her hands cupped up in front of her chest? Were her hands glowing?

The Norn of the Past glanced back over at her mother, to find the temporary shock the Daimakaicho had shown vanished back into her more typical cheerful superiority. “Well, this is getting to be quite a party,” Hild murmured. “Shall we join the gatecrashers?”

Before Urd could respond, she caught a hint of motion out of the corner of her eye and whipped around to stare as Lind flashed across the park toward the dueling pair, her signature poleax angled ahead and her long white epaulet strips and split coattail whipping in the wind of her passage.

/\

Akane was gasping for air as she frantically backed up under her former fiancé’s constant assault, desperately parrying strike after thrust after slash with aching arms, shaking her head slightly to try to keep sweat from running into her eyes and cursing herself for forgetting to tie on a headband in the rush to get this over with. She had miscalculated badly, not taking into account Raven’s new nature as a spirit — more specifically the fact that she no longer tired the way a human would, even one with the energy reserves of a high-powered martial artist. Akane had been expecting the usual breaks between clashes, and they hadn’t been happening. Instead, Raven had been pushing the pace brutally, though unfortunately she hadn’t been as careless as her first attack, and Akane’s control was getting shaky at best. She’d blown her best chance when she hadn’t _quite_ pulled off her initial disarm, she’d already had one tumble while backing up, and she had no idea how she’d managed to fend off her opponent while regaining her feet.

_Of course, it_ could _have something to do with the fact that Ranma — Raven — isn’t actually trying to kill me,_ Akane thought, one ear ringing with the sound of skirling steel from her latest parry, a lock of her hair blowing away on the breeze. Of course, if the two had been fighting a real (or rather typical) life-and-death duel, it would have been over with Raven’s initial rush and Akane gutting her like a pig and sending the overconfident revenant back to the Hell she’d come from. And if by some miracle the redhaired revenant had avoided the price of her carelessness, Akane would have been dead within a minute of the duel’s resumption — she’d improved over the last year, but not enough to take on the killer of Saffron even with her chosen weapon.

Not that the fact that neither girl was actually trying to kill the other meant they weren’t trying to _hurt_ each other — Akane was bleeding from at least half a dozen nicks and cuts, and Raven had almost lost a hand. She was a spirit, after all — she’d get it back, and she only needed one hand to take the life that would make her a Fury. As it was, the fight had become a single long, wearying, pain-filled engagement. The bleeding alone was a problem; if Akane didn’t make her move soon eventual blood loss would make her too lightheaded to continue, and Nodoka wouldn’t have to deliver the letter Akane had left with her for Sayuri and Yuka. (In the end, the Saotome matriarch had been unable to bring herself to endure more of her former child’s cold indifference, or watch either one girl she cared for die or another be doomed to return to serial rape.)

Akane twisted her arms to one side, avoiding another nick on her wrist (as it was, her grip was getting too slippery from blood from the first one), and Raven spun out of the way of her feeble counterstrike and flowed back to the attack — and Akane felt her fading confidence jump. The youngest Tendo might be outclassed by her opponent in sheer innate ability, but Akane had more _training_ , and that gave her an advantage she didn’t think Raven realized she had. _You’re getting predictable, love,_ she thought, hiding a wistful smile as she resumed her backward dance. She was hitting her last legs, Raven had recovered the confidence she temporarily lost with her initial near-disaster, but the duel had gone on long enough, and it was time.

Sliding to one side, Akane flicked the tip of her katana toward the inside of Raven’s thigh. An actual hit there would have no effect at all, spirits didn’t have femoral veins or arteries, but Raven still remembered being human and had been reacting accordingly for the entire duel.  She did this time as well. The Saotome katana dropped to knock Akane’s aside before the spirit’s riposte streaked toward her side, was knocked aside and up, came whipping back — and Akane smiled as her blade intersected it, guided it up, and she raised her chin to give the blade a clear shot at her throat. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as her gaze met Raven’s, the revenant’s eyes widening in shocked realization of Akane’s final gambit. _Sorry,_ Ranma _, but you’re Hell’s newest Fury, after —_

A flash of steel cut off her view of her love’s face with a clang, and Akane staggered back to stare at the massive axe head that had intercepted the Saotome blade inches away from killing her. Unbelieving, her eyes tracked down the long shaft to stare at the crouching white-clad, blue-haired woman braced as if she had just slid to a halt, holding the poleax at the horizontal as if the massive weapon was light as a feather. “What the hell are you doing?!” Akane shrieked as the old anger slammed through her, leaving her suddenly shaking even as she desperately sucked air into her lungs. “I’d almost —”

“Almost paid the ultimate sacrifice to save the girl you love, warrior, I know,” the interloper said calmly, straightening and raising her poleax in a salute before grounding the butt of the shaft.

As her initial shock (and her breathing) eased, the raven-haired girl took in the details of the newcomer, eyes widening and anger bleeding away at the sight of the apparently tattooed circles on forehead and cheek, the raw confident divine power she was radiating. Movement caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, and she shifted her gaze to see another woman and apparently a barely pubescent girl approaching — both also with facial tattoos and a presence that was stunning in its sheer holy radiance.

Tendo Akane slowly sank to her knees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title comes from the Belisarius series by David Drake and Eric Flint. Belisarius, one of the most famous generals in history (though perhaps not as saintly as the novels portray), while on a spying mission forges a close friendship with Rana Sanga, one of the best generals of a truly evil empire. They later meet on the battlefield, and Rana Sanga comes within a hair's breadth of gutting him like a fish before Belisarius's bodyguards intervene.


	14. Mutual Sacrifice

Nabiki could feel her older sister trembling where her arm circled Kasumi’s waist, hand resting on her thigh, as the two watched Raven force their little sister back and back, the steel-on-steel skirling sound of one frantic parry by Akane after another hitting their ears. Even the beginning-to-fret baby clamped in the oldest Tendo’s arms couldn’t distract her from the scene. If Nabiki knew her sister, Kasumi would be desperately hoping that Akane would somehow win and hating herself because of what that would mean for Ranma — Raven, rather.

Nabiki hadn’t been hopeful or conflicted, she’d been resigned. She’d had a good idea what her little sister was up to — suicide by opponent. She’d never believed Akane’s assertions that she actually had a chance to get Ranma out of Hell, and now the demon hunter-in-training had simply moved that suicide up to now.

But while Nabiki wasn’t a martial artist like her little sister, she _had_ been a bookie, betting on the fights that regularly erupted in her home ward, which meant she had to be able to judge the capabilities of the fighters she was betting on or go broke. And _that_ meant that she was following the fight much better than she suspected her older sister was, and her own resignation had been fading, warring with her own growing sick hope — and suddenly it was over, Raven’s blade blocked inches from Akane’s throat by the head of a massive polearm in the hands of a strange white-clad, tattooed woman that had come out of nowhere.

Akane was screaming something at the newcomer, but Nabiki couldn’t understand a word — it was suddenly all she could do to stay on her feet, and she found herself sweat-drenched and shaking, leaning against an older sister leaning against her.  The world seemed to rock in place as it faded in and out of focus and the memory of the last flurry of moves in Akane’s suicide gambit replayed in her mind’s eye.

Then the world abruptly snapped back into focus as Akane’s head whipped around and she dropped to her knees.

Nabiki’s head whipped around to follow her sister’s gaze to find another woman and a young girl approaching Raven and Akane, the woman with her hands cupped in front of her chest and apparently holding a tiny ball of light.

Then the two looked up past Akane, the little girl calling out a greeting, and Nabiki twisted to see what they were looking at — and found another two women, _floating_ down from one of the trees that lined the park, related somehow to the rest if the facial tattoos were any indication. The large raven that had accompanied Raven before coasted down to land on the shoulder of the woman with star tattoos.

Beside her, Kasumi was actually ignoring the now-squalling baby in her arms as she stared at the scene. “Nabiki, what’s happening?” the Tendo matriarch asked with a voice that shook.

“I don’t know, big sis, let’s go find out,” Nabiki replied. She strode toward her still-kneeling younger sister, Kasumi following behind as she finally began singing softly to the baby.

/\

Urd was shaking as she floated down to the ground beside her mother, horrified relief echoing through her as her mind kept replaying Lind’s dash across the field to save Akane — something that should have been _Urd’s_ job. What had she been doing sitting in a tree while Akane fought for Ranma’s — Raven’s life? _Because you thought it was_ safe _. That because neither one was actually trying to kill the other, you thought you could sit back and dither._

Of course, considering how _quickly_ everything had changed in the last seconds of the duel, it was possible she wouldn’t have been able to move fast enough to prevent Akane’s death even if she’d been right on top of them, and ... _‘And’ nothing, you’re grasping at straws — you failed, and if not for Lind doing your job for you an innocent girl you were supposed to protect would have died because of it._

“Rise, Akane-chan,” Lind was saying to the kneeling girl as they approached.

“What? But you’re ... and I shouted ...” the raven-haired girl stammered.

“You did nothing to be ashamed of,” the Valkyrie responded to the near-incoherent objection. “No, today the honor is yours. Please, rise.”

A fiercely blushing Akane rose to her feet just as her two sisters arrived, and Nabiki grabbed her younger sister’s arm to pull her to the side, a pale redheaded revenant following them. “Don’t you _ever_ do that to me again!” the pageboy-haired brunette hissed. “What’s going on?”

“That is an excellent question,” Lind said, and ignored the Mistress of Hell and her daughter’s half-sisters as they arrived to focus all her attention on Urd. “Report.”

Taking a deep breath, Urd forced her eyes to meet Lind’s and began. It took several minutes, not helped by the way the normally exuberantly cocky goddess/demon stumbled through her explanation of how miserably she’d failed in her assignment.

Her story of every assumption, miscalculation and dithering moment at an end, she found that somewhere along the way her eyes had dropped to the green lawn they stood on. Feeling completely drained, she again forced her gaze up to meet Lind’s, to find not a hint of either condemnation or sympathy, only calm acceptance. “Your performance of your assignment was poor, from the moment you first encountered Hild-sama to the end, and that end would have been failure,” the Valkyrie said firmly. “However, that failure was inevitable — it was an assignment for which you have neither training nor experience, and I will insist on giving my assessment to any review board you are called before. If anyone other than Kami-sama had given you this assignment, I would demand that they be removed from their position, disciplined, and reduced in rank. I would suggest that you ask Kami-sama why you were given the assignment at the next opportunity — sometimes he will tell you, at least after the fact.”

Glancing over at Hild beside her, Lind added, “But I believe the assignment is over. Is that not correct, Hild-sama?”

“Correct. When it took your intervention to prevent Akane-san’s death, Raven successfully completed her list. She is now my newest Fury, or will be once we return to Niflheim and register the results of the test.”

Urd started at the sound of her mother’s voice — in her need to unburden herself to the Valkyrie, she had actually forgotten that Hild was there. Ignoring Akane’s joyful shout of “Yes!” as she threw her arms around the redhead standing beside her where the three mortals and one spirit had been anxiously listening in, she twisted to stare at the Daimakaicho, a spike of fear shooting through her. Her mother’s tone had been flat, bleached of all emotion, the cheerily mocking undertone that had been there in the worst of times terrifyingly absent.

But Hild wasn’t looking at the exuberant mortal, or at Lind. Instead, all her attention was focused on Belldandy ... and the tiny ball of light in the hands cupped up in front of her chest that somehow gave the impression that it was huddling, trying to hide in the valley between the Norn of the Present’s breasts, sinking into the top of Belldandy’s dress. Urd felt her sudden fear grow, until she felt bleached of all warmth. She knew of only one thing that looked like that, that could terrify her mother that badly —

“Is that thing what I think it is?” Hild demanded.

Belldandy gave the Daimakaicho an old-fashioned look. “Hild-sama, you are scaring the little one,” she said sternly, before leaning down to whisper, “Don’t worry, I won’t let her hurt you,” to the tiny glow.

Urd stared for a moment as the light hesitantly shifted out from the valley of Belldandy’s breasts to once again hover over her palms. Somehow it seemed to Urd as if it was poking a nonexistent tongue out at one of the two most powerful beings on Earth and all its ancillary dimensions.

Urd switched her gaze back to Lind, to find the normally stoic Valkyrie gazing at her sister with a faint, fond smile on her face, shaking her head gently. Feeling the goddess/demon’s gaze, she looked over at the tanned platinum blonde. “Yes, that’s the Demon’s Seed,” she said.

A goddess cannot faint from shock — that requires a circulatory system so inefficient as to not have enough blood to satisfy all a body’s needs at once, and neither the divine nor the demonic actually _have_ blood per se. Nevertheless, Urd tried very, very hard to do just that, and Lind grabbed one of her arms as she swayed in place, her abrupt lightheadedness turning the world surreal.

/\

Unlike Urd, when Hild had declared Raven one of her Furies Kasumi had had to try very, very hard _not_ to faint, swaying in place, Nabiki holding her up (if she asked later, she knew Nabiki would say that was all she was doing, but even through her relief Kasumi could feel the tremors running through the body pressed against her back) while Akane whirled Raven around in circles. Fainting is a _very_ bad idea when you have a baby in your arms.

She was helped in her efforts by the flat, emotionless tone of the one that had just declared Raven hers when she made the announcement — for someone that had gotten what she wanted, she was a _very_ unhappy ... whatever she was. Something was wrong.

Straightening, Kasumi focused on star-tattooed platinum blonde. There was a strong family resemblance to the goddess that had stumbled and stuttered her way through the report on what was apparently her assignment to protect Akane, but to the martial artists’ daughter and sister there was a dangerous air to her, one shared only by one of the other four newcomers, the one that had saved Akane’s life.

And what was a ‘demon’s seed’? Whatever it was, it terrified the triangle-tattooed goddess.

Kasumi glanced over at the revenant and youngest Tendo, but they were still caught up each other. From the look of things spirits couldn’t cry, or Kasumi suspected from the way Raven was now clutching Akane the redhead would have been sobbing on her former fiancée’s shoulder from sheer relief. And from the way Nabiki was still at clutching her, her other sister wasn’t much better.

Shifting the fussing baby to one arm, Kasumi reached up to gently pull Nabiki’s arms from around her and stepped forward, glancing around at the tattooed child and women before focusing on the purple-haired goddess that had saved her sister’s life, apparently hold up the platinum blonde that had just given her report. “Excuse me, Goddess-sama, but what is a ‘demon’s seed’, and how does it involve my family?” she asked hesitantly.

The goddess glanced over. “My name is Lind, and with me are Urd, Belldandy and Skuld, the Norns of the Past, Present and Future, and Hild-sama, Daimakaicho of Niflheim,” she said, indicating each of the others as she named them before handing her poleax to the goddess she was helping brace up. “Here, Urd, use this to brace yourself,” she murmured before turning back to look Kasumi up and down. “No fighter, but enough courage for a flight of Valkyrie,” she mused, before nodding. “You even have the strength for what is to come.” She looked over Kasumi’s shoulder, and a moment later Nabiki stepped around to stand beside her sister on one side as Raven and Akane stepped up on the other, the pair holding hands. The goddess gave them an approving smile. “A true family,” she said, before sobering.

“The Demon’s Seed is a sending from a terrible being we call the Devourer. He travels from Earth to Earth, killing or enslaving each world’s defenders — divine, demonic, faerie or mortal — and making it over into his own image before feeding on its energies — its Life. When he has reduced his current conquest to a near-lifeless rock, he seeks out a new conquest, sending out invitations, seeking weak and greedy minds. Once the sendings find such minds, they offer the usual enticements, power, fame, wealth, pleasure.” Lind glanced sideways at the cute platinum blonde with star tattoos and the raven perched on her shoulder. Out of the corner of her eye, Kasumi saw Akane shudder and seem to shrink in slightly.

Lind continued, “To gain the offered wealth and power, his new acolytes are required to offer a newly pregnant woman, and open a portal through which he sends his Seed — a fragment broken off from his own soul that enters the baby and merges with the child’s spirit when it comes. As the child grows, it strengthens the connection with its father until around its eighteenth birthday it becomes a portal through which the Devourer can enter his new conquest.”

Raven and the Tendos stared in shock at the ball of light, and in response it again shrank back against its protector. Belldandy shifted one hand over to completely cover it, the light’s glow seeping through between her fingers, almost glaring at the mortal. “It isn’t the Seed’s fault who its father is,” she reprimanded them sternly. “Were your fathers so wonderful?”

Raven winced. “But ... ya have the Seed, ya kept it from mergin’, right?” she asked.

Belldandy’s stern look vanished, replaced by sympathy, and Kasumi felt her heart sink. She’d _known_ it couldn’t be that simple, but for a moment she’d hoped....

“Yes they did — this time,” Hild said, and if she still sounded serious enough to make her — sister? daughter? mother? how could you tell how old a goddess was, anyway? — whichever, she was making the other platinum blonde and the raven-haired child — Skuld and Urd? — nervous, but she at least sounded like a living being now, instead of a machine. “And the cult that summoned it is no longer an issue?” Hild asked Lind.

“There were no survivors,” Lind answered calmly.

“Excellent, more grist for my mills,” Hild chirped, smiling happily, her earlier seriousness gone.

Kasumi suddenly felt queasy as she remembered where she’d heard the terms “Norns” and “Niflheim” before, and realized that Hild could well have meant what she said about “grist” and “mills” literally.

“Anyway,” Hild continued, “even if Belldandy was morally flexible enough to keep the Seed from bonding until it was drawn back to merge with its father, the Devourer has our scent now — he has a lock on our world and will simply find other useful idiots to provide him with a new bride and raise the child afterwards. And the next time we may not be lucky enough to locate the next cult, they will be under orders not to draw attention to themselves and given power by their master to blind us to their location. Which means that Kami-sama already has a plan or you wouldn’t be here. Am I right, girls?”

“Yes, you are,” Belldandy replied.

/\

Akane _knew_ where this was headed — where it _always_ headed. The goddesses were going to ask that Ran — Raven magically fix all their problems for them, or tell her that it was somehow all her fault and _demand_ she make it right, talk about how only she could save them all. And whether because of the challenge or simply her generous spirit, Raven would rise to the bait while everyone else stood around and did nothing but applaud.

_Not this time._

“I’ll do it!” Akane almost shouted, and blushed as everyone turned to look at her and she realized that she had just interrupted a _goddess_.

“Do _what_ , exactly, child?” Hild asked, quirking an eyebrow.

“Whatever it takes,” Akane replied stubbornly even as her blush turned as fiery as Raven’s hair. “Be the mother, I guess — not something Raven can do, without a body.”

Belldandy smiled, and Akane felt her angry resentment fade in the face of the love and sympathy the goddess seemed to radiate. “A generous offer,” Belldandy replied, “but I’m afraid that isn’t possible — you aren’t pregnant now, and there isn’t time for you to become pregnant. However, there is a way for you and Raven to eventually rejoin each other as friends or lovers, as you choose.

“Akane, you will need to donate your body — your spirit will need to move on, leaving your body free to act as the host for the Seed once we Norns have returned it to its infancy. Normally, your spirit would seek out the afterlife your life has earned you for a time, before returning to Earth for your next life. But this time, we will see to it that you are reborn immediately to a family of our choosing.

“Raven, once the Seed has found its new home, we need you to join with it, to provide the human half of the new soul. You will be stripped of your memories when this happens but not the personality that every spirit carries with it from incarnation to incarnation, and your memories will return over time as you grow. We hope that your strength of will combined with the love and training we provide will give you the strength to resist your new father’s attempt to use you as a portal. Then, once the Devourer has been permanently denied entry into our world, you may seek out Akane and offer to restore her memories and reunite her with the family she will leave behind. You would be almost a year older than her, but I do not think that will matter much.”

“But, what if I ... if the future me refuses the memories?” Akane demanded.

Belldandy shook her head. “While it is possible that you might refuse the memories, considering the family that we have chosen to place you with, it is very unlikely. I do not think you have to worry about that.”

“Akane.” The youngest Tendo glanced sideways at the redhead whose hand she realized she was clutching hard enough to turn her knuckles white — if Raven had been human, her hand would have needed surgery to reconstruct. She forced her hand to relax, and Raven softly sighed with relief. “Akane,” she said again, “it’s fer the whole world.”

“But, why does it have to be _us_?” Akane protested. “Why can’t they find someone else this time?”

“If there was anyone better fer this, don’t ya think they’d be knockin’ on their door right now?” Raven replied, then ‘oomphed’, freezing in place as her former fiancée let go of her hand to pull her into a hard hug.

“It’s going to be so long!” Akane whispered in her ear.

“Not as long as it would’a been if ya managed to get me ta kill ya,” Raven replied, then winced as Akane stiffened. She hesitantly lifting her arms to return the embrace as she hurried on, “An’ ya won’t remember a thing ‘til I show up on yer doorstep. _I_ won’t remember, fer most’a the time. Yer sisters are the ones that are gonna be missin’ us.”

Akane froze. She had been so caught up in her — friend? lover? They hadn’t actually _done_ anything but fight and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to be with a girl that way, but the thought of not having Raven in her life now as Ranma had been before hurt so much.... _You aren’t the only one this must be hurting, and Ranma’s right — Kasumi and Nabiki are going to be the ones that remember._

She reluctantly released the redheaded spirit to turn and find her sisters facing the pair. Kasumi’s face was tilted down toward the now happily gurgling baby she was bouncing in her arms, but Akane could see tear tracks streaking her cheeks. Nabiki’s cheeks were dry, her face an emotionless mask, but her hands were clenched into fists. “Kasumi? Nabiki? I’m sorry ...”

Kasumi raised her head, and for a moment Akane’s resolve wavered at the sight of the pain in her mother figure’s eyes. But Kasumi forced a smile, and said, “You have nothing to be sorry for, a world to help save, and your love to be reunited with. Do what you have to, we’ll be waiting for you.” Nabiki didn’t speak, but jerked a nod.

Akane stepped over and pulled both sisters into a hard embrace, and started crying as they returned the hug. “I love you both,” she whispered, before reluctantly breaking away and turning to face Hild and the goddesses. “Let’s get this over with,” she managed to get out through a tight throat.

/\

Akane stared up at Raven from where she lay on the park lawn, shivering slightly from tension and the light breeze caressing her naked body. The redhead’s own naked body was covered with goosebumps, except within a few inches of the ball of light bobbing above her hands cupped up in front of her breasts.

Raven smiled tremulously down at her. “Yah ready?” she asked softly.

Akane nodded smiled back as her shivering increased. “I’m ready. Love you, Baka.”

“Love you, Tomboy,” Raven looked up where Akane knew the oldest of the three Norns stood and nodded, then smiled back down at her as the voluptuous platinum blonde began to sing. Her love’s bright blue eyes were the last thing she saw before the weight of the unearthly music of the goddess’s voice washed her away with a cascade of images of her life.

_“Ran — Raven, you didn’t escape somehow from Rothgan’s Wall, did you?”_

_“Let me GO! It’s my fault, I deserve to die!”_

_“Ranma, I told you to stay out of my FIGHTS!”_

_“I’m Akane, you want to be friends?”_

_“Do you think Dr. Tofu thinks I’m cute?”_

_“Daddy, how can I be a martial artist if you don’t TRAIN me! ?”_

_“What’s wrong with Mommie?”_

_“I’m gonna be the best martial artist ever!”_

And everything went white.

/\

Raven dropped her gaze from Urd (and the _extremely_ strange top half of a breathtakingly beautiful winged woman that seemed to be projecting from the goddess’s back, but Raven had more important concerns), looking back down to Akane’s brown eyes, the youngest Tendo’s terrified gaze locking on her own. Raven smiled, dropping one of her hands from cupping the Seed to grasp Akane’s hand, and Akane smiled back for a moment. Then Urd and her angel’s duo-toned wordless song bore down on them, Akane’s gaze lost its focus into infinity, and before Raven’s eyes her former fiancée’s face grew younger as her body shrank.

Even as the redhead found herself holding the tiny hand of a baby between thumb and forefinger, the youngest of the Norns lifted her own voice to soar above her sister’s, and as endless possibilities seemed to open up before the revenant another ball of light slowly rose from the baby’s chest and passed straight through the revenant, before flying to circle about the child goddess and her own beautiful winged half-angel, the human soul dancing and spinning to the Skuld’s song, and a thread of laughter resonated through both of the competing melodies at the sight.

So shaken was Raven by the sense of Akane’s presence from their brief joining that only the sudden coolness of her palm warned her that the half a soul that they had had to spend long minutes coaxing into her hands was gone, and her eyes dropped just in time to see the Seed vanish into the baby Akane’s chest. At that instant Belldandy and her angel added their own wordless thread to the music of Time, a ribbon of sound that seemed to wrap itself around Urd’s foundation of all that had gone before and lifted to mix with Skuld’s endless possibilities, binding the two together into a harmonious whole — and Raven found herself falling forward, settling downward, the baby looming larger and larger until it seemed to encompass all that was.

And everything went white.

/\

Nabiki blinked furiously, trying to clear her eyes of sparkles as the lines, circles and glyphs of glowing light that had sprung up around Raven and her sister with the beginning of the Norns’ song faded with its ending. Vision clearing, she ignored the already-fading memory of music beyond anything she had ever heard, piercing to the soul, and focused on the center of the park where the revenant and her sister had been to find the lovely triangle-tattooed brunette already bending to pick up a tiny form, her sisters standing beside her.

Then Kasumi was pulling her forward, ignoring Nabiki’s protests that it might not be safe to rush toward the goddesses. “Is she all right?” the Tendo matriarch demanded as they reached the Norns.

Belldandy looked up from where she’d been making faces at the happily gurgling baby in her arms and turned so the Tendos could see. “Yes, Raven is,” she replied with a smile. “See for yourselves.”

Nabiki lifted an eyebrow as she examined the infant — the black hair was right, but the gray skin tone was definitely odd. “Is that color normal?” she asked, frowning.

“Yes, Nabiki-san, it is if half of your soul is of the Devourer’s inheritance,” Lind said as she and Hild joined them, the raven Thought still riding the Daimakacho’s shoulder.

“So Akane isn’t in there?”

“Nope, got her right here!” Skuld chirped from where she was leaning against Urd, face drawn with exhaustion. When Kasumi and Nabiki looked over at her, the girl lifted a hand to her chest. “She’s with Noble Scarlet, she’ll be safe until we can send her to her new home.”

“Will ... will we be able to visit her?” Kasumi asked hesitantly.

But Belldandy shook her head. “No. She won’t remember you, and you would not be able to resist demanding a connection that her previous life entitles you to. She and her new family would resent it, and you. Or you would be able to resist the temptation, and remain on the outside looking in. It is better to wait until she remembers, even if it will be almost two decades. You will have your own child to raise, after all.”

Kasumi glanced down at the sleeping baby she’d almost forgotten she was holding in one arm (miraculously sleeping baby, Nabiki thought, and wondered if any of the goddesses had something to do with it), and nodded reluctant acquiescence, shoulders slumping. “Will we at least be able to see Ranma?” she pleaded. “She and ... my child could grow up together —”

But Belldandy was shaking her head again. “I am truly sorry, Kasumi-chan, but that will not be possible. Raven will not be safe around mortals for many years, until she attains control over her heritage. However, with your permission I will visit from time to time — I can at least let you know how your loved ones are doing.”

As Kasumi vigorously nodded and Nabiki felt some of the ache in her soul ease, Belldandy added, “And there is one thing I can do for you.” Shifting the sleeping Raven to one arm, she reached out with the other to lay her hand on the forehead of the baby in Kasumi’s arm. She again lifted her voice in song, though this time without her angelic companion, and for a brief moment the baby seems to glow with a soft pulsing light. As the melody died away, the mortals’ memory of it again fading as it died, the Norn of the Present smiled even as she fought to stay erect. “Now, your child will appear as she would have if her parents had been Japanese. From what I’ve observed, that will make her life as she grows up much easier. And now, we must leave before Raven awakens. Please, be well.” With that, the four goddesses and the Daimakaicho of Niflheim faded from view, leaving the last of the Tendos alone in the park.

The two simply stood and stared out across the peaceful scene even as people started filtering back onto the grassy sward and children swarmed into the nearby playground. The Magic was over. Finally, Nabiki reached up and gently shook her older sister’s shoulder. “Come one, Kasumi, let’s go home. Momma Nodoka must be frantic by now. And I’ll help you come up with a name for the — for _our_ baby.”


End file.
